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ESSAYS AND STUDIES

BY MEMBERS OF

THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION

VOL. XIV

COLLECTED BY*H. W. GARROD

NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE

TRENT UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

ESSAYS AND STUDIES

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

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ESSAYS AND STUDIES

BY MEMBERS OF

THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION

VOL. XIV

Collected by H. W. GARROD

1929

Reprinted 1966 for

Wm. DAWSON & SONS LTD., LONDON
with the permission of
THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION

THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION

President 1928.

Sir Henry J. Newbolt, D.Litt., LL.D.
Chairman.

Mr. J. C. Squire.

Hon. Treasurer.

Mr. J. E. Talbot.

Hon. Secretary.

Miss Gwendolen Murphy.
Secretary.

Mr. A. V. Houghton,

4 Buckingham Gate, S.W. 1.

Originally Printed in Great Britain at
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD

Reprinted by Photo-Lithography in Great Britain by
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CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE POET’S DICTIONARY .... 7

Oliver Elton.

II. MARLOWE’S TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DR.

FAUSTUS . 20

Percy Simpson.

III. JOHNSON’S IRENE . 35

David Nichol Smith.

IV. CHARLOTTE BRONTE . 54

Janet Spens.

V. TENNYSON AND WALES .... 71

Herbert G. Wright.

VI. AN C RENE WISSE AND HA LI MEIBHAD . 104

J. R. R. Tolkien.

8^939

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

IN every art or craft down to the humblest we instinctively
figure the procedure as a struggle with something that is
not ourselves : with some kind of ‘ matter ’ that resists in
different ways and with varying tenacity. The desired pro¬
duct has to be presented to one or more of the senses as the
mind has seen it ; the vision has to be expressed, and expres¬
sion means communication. Still, I agree with Professor
Alexander 1 that the artist ‘ does not, in general, first form
an image (if he be a poet, say) of what he wants to express,
but finds out what he wanted to express by expressing it ’.

This is more especially true of the art of words ; and in the
present essay I shall keep to poetry, and for the most part
to high or serious poetry. The resistance of words is not like
that of stone or wood. The shaper of an oar or of a boome¬
rang must have a clear mental picture of the thing before he
sets to work. Formally speaking, his task is one of subtrac¬
tion ; guided by the pattern in his head, he cuts away part of
the wood, which resists him according to its own law. The
material is dead. But words are ‘ not absolutely dead things ’ ;
words have a stubborn life of their own. They are irreducible ;
they have been shaped, for the most part unawares, by a
million dead and living artificers ; and they put up a stiffer
resistance than a block. On the other hand, they have begun
to do our work for us already — if only we can find them.
But where, then, are they ]

The carver can hardly escape the fancy that his oar is
really, and not only potentially, in the block, and that he
is merely, as it were, unpacking it. So, too, the poet is sure
that the mot unique, which will tell him what he is trying to
mean, exists somewhere, and that he has only to find it, or

1 Artistic Creation and Cosmic Creation , p. 8 ( I'roceedinys of British
Academy, 1928).

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

(in a 1 wise passiveness ’) to wait for it. This may be an
illusion ; there may be no such word ; and, if so, there is
something wrong with his half-formed conception. But if it
does exist, then it is in ‘ the back of his head ’, that is, in the
disorderly stores of his mental dictionary. These stores are
much smaller, and for artistic purposes more select, than the
contents of the Oxford English Dictionary. But externally,
they all are, or ought to be, in that treasure-house. How
much smaller is the poet’s stock, and on what principle is it
selected? What kinds of word, to be found in the O.E.D.,
offer him most resistance, and in what varying degrees ?
Well, the O.E.D. itself offers certain clues; but as the theme
is an endless one I can only suggest headings.

In the preface to the Dictionary there is a star-shaped
diagram (vol. i, p. xvi), made to represent the stable and the
changing elements in the language. In the midst is lingua
communis, the body of words in general use, the ‘ nucleus or
central mass of many thousand words whose “ Anglicity ” is
unquestioned ’. Above is the term ‘ literary ’, and below is
‘ colloquial ’, sinking down into * slang Various rays show
the perpetual process by which words come into this common
stock, and either stay there, or go out again into limbo more
or less completely : foreign words, dialect words, scientific and
technical words. There is no definite 1 quota the immigrants
take their chances of making a living.

This scheme may be filled up in order to indicate the
resoui'ces, or temptations, of the poet. Keeping the central,
or common language (1) with its upward and downward
tendencies, and going clockwise from the top, we may specify
the following groups: (2) Biblical words; (3) archaic; (4)
‘ poetic diction ’ in the narrower sense (with two subdivisions.

(а) Icennings and (b) compound words) ; (5) foreign words ;

(б) dialect ; (7) slang and very homely words ; (8) technical
words ; (9) scientific ; and (10) philosophical (including some
theological) terms, which bring us round the clock again into

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

the upper regions of language. It is plain that neighbouring
groups run into one another, and that there are many cross
lines ; and, further, that some groups will resist the poet much
more than others, and that for diverse reasons. His success,
naturally, can only be judged by the event ; defeat can seldom
be predicted as a matter of course ; and there are few taboos
on a ‘priori grounds. The present sketch must be severely
limited, and certain vital matters must be ruled out. One of
these is the sound of words (a great topic, of which one
chapter would deal with the poetic use of discords). Every
word, from the poet’s point of view, has three aspects, which
can be separated, if only for analysis: (a) the sound; ( b ) the
definition, or intellectual content, which is given by the lexico¬
grapher ; and (c) the associations, or aura, to which the poet
and his hearers are alive. Turn, in the O.E.D., or in Johnson,
from the masterly definitions to the examples, and it is plain
how little of (c) can be comprehended in (b). In the groups
now to be noticed the aura is sometimes stronger and some¬
times fainter ; and the fainter it is the greater the resistance
that the poet must experience.

Ill

Another limitation, which will at once pi’ovoke protest,
must be observed here as far as possible. I shall keep mostly
to vocabulary , or single words ; and this, it will be truly said,
is to miss out most of the poetry. All, of course, depends on
their setting, on their metrical union into a poetic phrase.
Like Browning’s musician, the poet makes out of three sounds
‘ not a fourth sound, but a star ’. Yet this very fact dispenses
us from saying too much about no. 1, the central speech. lor
here all, or almost all, depends on the setting. We know
what may be done with the commonest monosyllables:

Long is the way

And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.

Difficilis a see nsus : this ‘ sentiment ’, as Addison would have
called it, soars above the speaker and occasion and becomes
a truth universal. It owes its power, in point of form, to the

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

commonness of the words ; to the two grammatical inver¬
sions, the first of them enforced by a metrical inversion that
comes late in the line and is thus doubly emphatic ; to the
doubled stress, also late, in ‘ leads up ’ ; to the sudden addi¬
tion, or sighed-out after-thought, ‘ and hard coming after
the line-pause ; to the placing of ‘ Hell and ‘ light ’, which
bear all the weight. But this kind of dissection is beyond
my text. Happily no amount of it can spoil, or so I believe,
the effect. In any case the lingua communis leaves little to
be said about vocabulary. The words taken singly (except
‘ Hell ’) would not much arrest attention.

It is otherwise with the remaining groups, 2-10. Most of
these are like the ‘ aliens ’, each of them wearing his own
dress, whom the citizens, says Aristotle, at once notice in
their streets. This is the simile that he uses in the Rhetoric
for ‘ strange ’ words. Here the common words, the citizens in
their daily garb, provide the setting and the contrast. The
effect depends upon the strangers being able to make good
their presence ; contrast must end in harmony. Poetry, of
course, is sown all over with the failures, with experiments
that startle and leave us cold ; but I will touch rather on the
successes.

(2) Biblical and kindred words. Of these, for similar
reasons, there will be less to say. They are the fine flower
of the • common ’ speech, and therefore few of them, by them¬
selves, are specially arresting, except those which have an
exclusively sacred association. It is rather their sustained
use that gives character to a style. The words that stand
out, taken singly, are either suggestive of doctrine ( oblation ,
sanctify, elect (noun), and atonement) ; or, like 'predestination
(which is not in the Bible), they belong to group 10, or, like
manna , they are now in metaphorical use, but easily suggest
the Hebrew story. Or, again, they are practically out of use
and have to be learnt ( ouches , cockatrice, wimple). That is, if
used at all, they are

(3) Archaic words. For these the poets have found their

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

chief storehouse iu the glossary of Spenser. He, as we know,
besides coining on his own account, also used dialect (No. 6).
His followers, like Giles and Phineas Fletcher, took some of
his vocabulary ; and the later race of imitators did the same,
so that his language in their hands was a revived archaism.
In the Castle of Indolence, with its ‘ soft-embodied fays ’ and
‘ with all these sounds y-blent it is often as beautiful and
successful as with Spenser himself. But here, and with other
Spenserians like Croxall and Shenstone and William Thomp¬
son, who also did well, the virtue lies less in the single words,
in ‘ beautiful things made new ’, than in the general tint of
the language and in the echoed music. Spenser himself has
the good word of great poets and of all readers for his
invention ; his ' no language ’ has, I have remarked else¬
where, more poetic life in it than any of the actual dialects
of England. The felicity of his old-new words needs no
praise; but his moderation in the use of them is less often
noticed. In a catalogue they seem numerous; but they do
not, in fact, bulk very large in the mass of his verse, at least
after the date of the Shepherd’s Calendar. Spelling apart,
and not counting the slight twist given to certain inflexions,
these strange words are like an occasional gleam of gold or
purple in the pattern ; or like precious or semi-precious
stones sparkling here and there from the inlay of an Eastern
tomb. Sometimes they come in a cluster ; in descriptions of
pageantry, armour, and dress Spenser is tempted to accumu¬
late them. The effect is a new emphasis ; and the loose,
iterative style of the Faerie Queene is for the moment braced
up. Belphoebe wears a silken camus , besprinkled with golden
aygulets , and

Pur/led upon with many a golden plight.

On her brows sit many graces,

Working belgards, and amorous retrate ;

And she wears

gilden buskins of costly cordwaine,

All bard with golden bendes, which were entayld
With curious antickes, and full faire aumayld.

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

It is the dress of a masquer ; some of these words failed to
stay, or to stay long, even in poetry ; but the picture is none
the worse for that. An instance, thoroughly Spenserian in
tone, may be added from Thomas Hardy :

A little chamber, then, with swan and dove
Ranged thickly, and engrailed with rare device
Of reds and purples, for a paradise.

The peculiar idiom of William Morris is to be found — apart,
that is, from his perverse Beowulf — chiefly in his prose stories ;
and there, to my own ear, the effect is harmonious and delight¬
ful. The language, second nature to the writer, soon becomes
so to the hearer. The case of Chatterton, with his many 'pre¬
tended, and often incongruous, archaisms, is a special one.
To value them aright and to feel his genius, it is best to
forget all philology and to use a bare glossary.

(4) 1 Poetic diction ’ in the restricted sense. It must be
enough to refer to the special features found in (a) ‘ kennings ’
and (b) compound terms. But these two can hardly be
separated, seeing that the kenning is often a compound single
word, though often a group of divided words. The Old Norse
term for a circumlocutory word or phrase is a convenient
one for many usages, all of the same genus. Such are the
periphrases in Old Norse and Old English verse ; in Milton
and his imitators ; in Pope and his imitators ; and those in
Tennyson. The ‘swan-road’, the ‘ All-wielder ’, ‘Pale-neb’
[vulture], the ‘ Sanctities of Heaven ’, the ‘ speckled fry ’
[trout], the ‘ chalice of the grapes of God ’, and the ‘ hard-
grained Muses of the cube and square ’, all aim at rousing
the fancy ; they call a thing not by its name but in a manner
which at once describes and half-conceals it. They are in the
nature of easy riddles. The Old English Riddles, which are
whole poems, are harder ; but the principle is the same. In
the Old Norse ‘ court poetry ’ kennings tend to become dis¬
tressing enigmas, and are a mark of decline. In our eighteenth-

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

century jargon (the ‘ tinny race ’, &c.) the poet’s fancy is dead
and he is following the line of least resistance— doing the
easiest thing he can.1 But kennings, of one sort or another,
are deep in the very nature of poetry and of all impassioned
speech. They can be designed for beauty and dignity ; but
then they must not be obscure, or the dignity is in danger.
In Milton they are used majestically. John the Baptist is
‘ the great Proclaimer ’ ; and there are the ‘ grand infernal
Peers’, with ‘Hell’s dread Emperor’, their ‘mighty Para¬
mount ’. But these are phrases, not single words. In Old
English single compound words, as well as phrases, are of
course inherent in the poetic language. Here I will only
refer to Professor Wyld’s paper on ‘ Diction and Imagery in
Anglo-Saxon Poetry ’,2 where the analogies with eighteenth-
century verse are brought out, and which throws so much
light on the artistic problem ; namely, on how far these
expressions were, at the time of writing, and now are, alive.
Many became mere formulae ; but the total effect, beyond
a doubt, is one of great beauty and expressiveness.

As for the compounds in our later poetry, they still await
an equally instructive treatment ; they are matter for a book.
Naturally, they are most in favour with our concentrative
poets, such as Gray, Keats, and Dante Rossetti ; although
from Shakespeare, too, especially in his tragedies, they seem
to pour out spontaneously, when he is moved to be elemental
and tremendous :

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts . . .

Of the slow studious writers, Rossetti seems to depend
least on Miltonic or other tradition, and to experiment most
freely. In one sonnet of the House of Life occur cloud-control,
moontrack, Jire-tried (vows), and still-seeded (secret of the

1 For a systematic account of this habit, and of others which I am not
attempting to discuss (Latinism, personification, abstraction, &c.), see
Dr. Thomas Quayle’s work, Poetic Diction (in the eighteenth century),
1924).

1 Essays and Studies of the English Association, 1925, vol. xi.

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

grove). The first and last of these are dubious : but Rossetti
has many splendid examples, as in the line

The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of hope ;
and again :

Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies

Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies.

Such compounds as sun-glimpses, involving two weighted
syllables together, make the rhythm slower and more solemn ;
and indeed this is the general effect of poetic compounds. So
with Keats :

Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers among.

And it follows that such forms encounter the check, offered
everywhere in English, by knots of consonants : and this has
either to be eluded, or justified by the purpose. In Keats’s
line, no doubt, the rush of the sibilants answers to the hiss
of the wind.

(5) Little need be said of foreign words not yet acclima¬
tized, which are too distracting to do much good in serious
poetry. They chiefly befit middle verse of the humorous or
ironical kind. Dryden took his risks in the pleasant line

To taste the fraischeur of the summer air.

But the word was not wanted and did not gain a footing.
Thomas Hardy speaks of ‘ the formal-faced cohue where
‘ mob ’, or ‘ throng was not sufficiently contemptuous. But
these terms, which give trouble to the lexicographers, have to
be well installed in the language before they can serve the
imagination aright.

(6) Dialect words. Here is matter for another volume.
Professor George Gordon 1 selects some twenty such words
from Shakespeare, observing that ‘ most of them are rather
forcible than pretty, and have more pith and village realism
than poetry’. Not the least notable is the thunderous verb,
in King Lear,

Gallow the very wanderers of the dark.

1 Shakespeare's English, Tract no. xxix, S.P. E., p. 269.

THE POET’S DICTIONAKY

It means ‘ to terrify ’, and is chosen by the poet to terrify us.
These aliens have a different franchise from Scots or Dorset
or Lincolnshire words scattered in a regular dialect poem ; or,
as with Burns and Fergusson, in one written in the Northern
variety of the national speech. Here, of course, the strangeness
is greater for the Southern reader than for the Scot ; but even
the Scot has to learn the language. The Northern words,
forms, and sounds, being mostly concerned with concrete
things, have all the sap and colour of home-grown fruits, and
are not properly ‘ strange ’ at all. Gentler effects are produced
by Barnes ; and the soft Dorset speech is used to perfection,
though more sparsely, by Hardy with his apple-blooth , and
poppling brew , and leazes lone.

VII

(7) We are now down near the foot of the clock, with slang
and its congeners, which touch dialect on one side, and technical
terms (no. 8) on the other. These last are trade-slang, or
trade-dialect, and I pass on to them, as slang would introduce
the large subject of what may be called frontier-verse, and the
lower limits of the poetic vocabulary. Ugly, grotesque, or
gross words, I will only remark, may be made clean and
presentable, and lifted into poetry (as we see in Juvenal), by
indignation. His satires, most people will agree, are poetry.
Mr. Sludge the Medium, though it contains no one word that
is ‘ taboo ’, is below the line, and there is only a scrap or two
of poetry in it. We can only decide here by net impressions,
and single words count for little.

(8) As to technical words, they are stubborn things, because
the bare meaning is everything and is usually concrete and
prosaic. The aura is not there already, and the poet has to
make it. The thing can be done ; M‘Andrew has done it.
His engine is to him a poem that illustrates the works of the
Lord and the reign of law :

From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, 0 God.

This is poetry of a kind, and I will not quote instances where

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

the effect is overdone. Still, these effects are not normal in
highly pitched verse.

Shakespeare’s notorious use of law-terms in impassioned
speech is harder to judge. They must have had more colour
and feeling in them for him than we can detect ; although, no
doubt, they are one species of the ‘quibbles’ that Johnson
condemned. Romeo’s sentence,

seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death

is a really bad quibble. And how many of the thousand
lovers who have repeated the line

My bonds in thee are all determinate

have been checked by the legal image ? Probably very few.
Shakespeare is like the Bible ; we know him so well that we
do not notice difficulties.

VIII

But such terms border on (9) Scientific vocabulary. Milton
enlists more hard words of this kind than any other great
English poet. Some of them check every reader, and have to
be learned : colure, cycle, epicycle, thwart, obliquities. They
belong to the extinct astronomy, with its astrological implica¬
tions. These, indeed, survived it, and are now perceptible in
‘lucky star’ and such expressions: and horoscopes die hard.
Predominant and influence remain as metaphors, or abstracts,
with very little physical suggestion. They are a section of the
very large class discussed by Miss Elizabeth Holmes in her
article1 on ‘Milton’s Use of Words’. The words in question,
mostly of Latin origin, retained for Milton, and often for his
contemporaries, an aura of their original, physical meanings :
and this we must recover, if we are to appreciate them. He
brought out, or brought back, their latent appeal to the
senses. How Young, Thomson, and others echoed Milton in
this matter and usually came to grief, is an old story. A
different and very adroit use of technical and scientific terms

1 Essays and Studies of the English Association, 1924, vol. x.

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

is found in Tennyson’s Princess. He wrote at a moment
when the common language was being enriched by the new
science, in a degree not to be paralleled since Renaissance
times. Telegraph and parachute and catalepsy still spoke to
the fancy, and Tennyson scatters them in his fanciful verse.
Geology, too, was coming home to the popular mind : and he
picks out, for the sake of their sound and strangeness,

rag and trap and tuff,

Amygdaloid and trachyte.

(10) Philosophical and kindred words. As we know, some
of the masters, Plato and Berkeley and Hume (being also
men of letters), can write, and often do write, with very little
stiff’ terminology. They are all the more elusive, perhaps,
for that reason : but they make everything seem easy. The
poets who try to expound abstract ideas and to inlay scholastic
terms meet with a very palpable resistance from language.
Many such terms, of course, have no association with the
senses, or fringe of imagery. The -ologies are out of the
question, like logic and ethics. Has the noun complex yet
reared its horrid head in a modern lyric 1 Probably. It
belongs to our No. 7, slang. But there are poets who can
philosophize without danger. Spenser, in his Hymn of Love ,
and Hymn of Beauty, steers his bark wonderfully ; and even in
his ‘ trinal triplicities on high ’ (the nine orders of subordinate
heavenly beings) he does not go aground. But the great
performer in this region is Lucretius ; and he is the harder
pressed, because he is expounding physics, where the terms
have strict senses and sharp edges : plenum, inane, primordia
rerum. How Lucretius, when he is stirred, can make these
words glow, needs no description. One of his greatest effects
is produced by a word from the Greek, which the poverty of
Latin, so he tells us, forces him to borrow although the meaning
is easy to explain. It is the theory that every object consists
of tiny particles of its own shape and kind :

Nunc et Anaxagorae scrutemur homoeomerian.

2339*14

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

Theological terms often have a very rigid sense : essence,
attribute, necessity , foreknowledge, coeternal. But they can
serve poetry, because their associations, religious, historical,
and imaginative are manifold. The Athanasian Creed has
made some of them familiar. Milton does not shrink from
them, and is often nobly justified. Light is

Bright effluence of bright essence increate ;
and the line

Fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute

is an example of great poetry that is wholly destitute of
imagery and lives on its intellectual evocations. Yet, as
though Milton felt the danger, in the next line he brings the
idea down to earth — perhaps to the Cretan labyrinth1?

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.

Another of these tough words is predestination. Magnificent
in sound, and sinister in meaning, it is nevertheless hard to
animate in verse. Milton, in one of his dogmatic passages,
hardly succeeds :

As if predestination overruled
Their will, disposed by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge.

But M'Andrew, I believe, succeeds once more, though it be by
violence :

Predestination in the stride o’ yon connectin’-rod.

This, again, is a feat : it is verse, with a ring of poetry. On
the whole, the English writers like Spenser, or his follower
Sir John Davies in Nosce Teipsum, have prevailed rather by
shunning than by challenging the diction of the schools.

Can we now grade these diverse groups of words in the
measure of their reluctance to become poetical ? Leaving out
slang and the like, and also the half-English foreign importa¬
tions, which scarcely count, the result seems to be this.
Technical words are by no means quite intractable, but have

THE POET’S DICTIONARY

less aura than the rest. Scientific words, in the past at any
rate, have had more, especially at the two great seasons of
their immigration, the Renaissance and the age of Darwin.
Some philosophical and theological terms, in spite of their
stubborn intellectual content and natural bareness, have rich
associations for the poet, if only he can partially submerge
that content and make play with the undefined element.
Kennings and single-word compounds are inherent in the
poetic language ; they often betray their date, and may easily
be a bad symptom ; but they are never far off, and at their
best they may almost be poems in themselves — the shortest
poems possible. Archaic words, though not thus inherent in
poetic language, are triumphantly managed by a very few
masters. Biblical words and the lingua comynun is generally,
especially in its higher ranges, need offer no resistance at all ;
and depend, therefore, more than all the rest, on their neigh¬
bours, their order, and their metrical value. The poet, and
perhaps every reader, may know all this without being told ;
but analysis never does any harm to our understanding, or to
our enjoyment, of poetry. Oliver Elton.

MARLOWE’S TRAGICAL HISTORY OF

DOCTOR FATJSTUS '

IN March. ] 581, a brilliant undergraduate went into residence
at Benet College, Cambridge. He came up from the King’s
School, Canterbury, with a scholarship on the Parker founda¬
tion, which required the holder, on completing his University
career, to enter the Church. He took his degree and kept his
terms during the six years’ tenure of the scholarship, and
proceeded master of arts in 1587. Then just at the date when
he should have rounded off this eminently respectable career
with the style and title of ‘ the reverend Christopher Marlowe ’
and the prospect of a college living in later life, the authorities
at Cambridge and at Canterbury must have heard with deep
pain that their promising young scholar was following a very
different lure and had decided that his gifts of literary
expression would find freer scope on the stage than in the
pulpit. He was producing a play called Tamburlaine the
Great , original alike in form and in conception and destined
to be much more than a contemporary success : it stands out
for all time as one of the landmarks of English drama.

The type of character depicted in Tamburlaine recurs in
Doctor Faustus, but in a text so corrupted and overlaid by the
work of other writers, mere playhouse hacks, that in only
a fragment of the whole can we trace with certainty the hand
of Marlowe. We shall discern more clearly the scope and
intention of Doctor Faustus if we glance for a moment at
some characteristic features of the earlier play.

Tamburlaine is essentially the work of a young man,
touched with a note of youthful idealism which he never

1 A Lecture deiivered before the Association in London on 9 December,
1924. For the textual problem raised in tbe course of the lecture, readers
are referred to the writer’s paper on the 1604 Quarto contributed to
volume vii of the Association’s Essays and Studies.

MARLOWE’S TRAGICAL HISTORY OF Lit. FAUSTUS 21

recaptured in his later writing ; it has something of the heroic
quality of Tamburlaine himself —

Of stature tall and straightly fashioned,

Like his desire, lift upwards and divine.1
Writing in this exalted mood, Marlowe gave a new turn to
tragedy. He concentrated all his creative power on one
towering and colossal figure, round which the other characters
revolve like satellites in the orbit of a planet. The hero is
the incarnation of unbridled power, pitiless in the quest of it
and achieving his aim with superhuman energy, but idealized
by the soaring imagination of the poet. Marlow varies the
tones of his instrument, but the louder notes prevail. Yet
always, whether expressed in gorgeous rhetoric or in pure
poetry, the note of aspiration is sustained.

Is it not passing brave to be a king,

And ride in triumph through Persepolis ? 2
And the clear, ringing music of that last line so caught the
poet’s ear that he repeated it as a refrain, making blank verse
lyrical. It is followed by Tamburlaine’s scornful question,

Why then, Casane, should we wish for aught
The world affords in greatest novelty
And rest attemptless, faint, and destitute ? 3
Tamburlaine in this poetic mood even expounds the philosophy
of ambition :

Nature, that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breast for regiment,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wandering planet’s course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,

Will us to wear ourselves and never rest,

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,

That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.4

1 Tamburlaine, Part I, 11. 461-2, in the Oxford edition of Marlowe by
C. F. Tucker Brooke, which is quoted in future references.

2 758-9. 3 777-9. 4 869-80.

MARLOWE’S

‘ Still climbing after knowledge infinite ’ — the words are note¬
worthy as anticipating the theme of Doctor Faustus, which
probably followed closely on the second part of Tamburlaine ;
Marlowe seems half-consciously to be moving towards the
conception of his second play. The quest of infinite know¬
ledge is a new phase of ambition, and he gives it kindred
treatment. There is little appreciable advance in dramatic
method. Marlowe had not yet felt his way to a well-knit and
coherent plot. All the action centres in a single character
absorbed by a passion which consumes him. Both Tambur¬
laine and Faustus, it may be noted, are men of low origin.
Tamburlaine is a shepherd :

I am a lord, for so my deeds shall prove,

And yet a shepherd by my parentage.1

Of Faustus we are told at once in the prologue that his
parents were ‘ base of stock High intellectual gifts and
a boundless energy carry them to their goal. The conception
is suggestive as coming from the son of a Canterbury shoe¬
maker.

But if the method of the play of Doctor Faustus is un¬
changed, the material is better suited for dramatic handling.
Tamburlaine throughout is rhetorical and spectacular ; it is
not so much a drama as a pageant — the triumphal pageant
of ambition, impressive indeed by the sheer glory of the
verse, but so monotonous in treatment that the two parts
really make up a cumbrous ten-act play. In Doctor Faustus
much of Marlowe’s original writing has been pared down by
successive playhouse editors in order to add to the clownery,
but the main design is clear, it is boldly carried out, and the
theme has great dramatic possibilities. The play is some¬
thing more than a variant of the type depicted in Tambur¬
laine : it is not a mere study of ambition ; it depicts the
tragedy of a human soul, and in the closing scene it achieves
this end with a strength and intensity as yet unknown in
English drama.

It is this sense of the inner conflict which makes Doctor

1 230-1.

TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DR. FAUSTUS

Faustus what the title-page of the early editions expressly
calls it, a 1 Tragical History Faustus is depicted in the
opening scene among his books, turning them over ir¬
resolutely, undecided to what study to devote himself. When
Valdes advises him to enter upon the study of necromancy,
he notes that weakness and promises success on one con¬
dition —

If learned Faustus will be resolute.1

Faustus protests his resolution, but it is noticeable that,
when his mind is made up and he enters to conjure after
being instructed in the ritual, he has to reassure himself :

Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute,

And try the uttermost magic can perform.2

His spirit ebbs and flows like the tide. In the first flush of
his success he utters the exultant cry,

Had I as many souls as there be stars,

I’d give them all for Mephistophilis.3

But when he has time to reflect, he is cowed with hopeless
doubt :

Now, Faustus, must thou needs be damned,

And canst thou not be saved ?

What boots it then to think of God or heaven ?

Away with such vain fancies, and despair —

Despair in God, and trust in Belsabub.

Nay, go not backward : no, Faustus, be resolute.

Why waverest thou ? 0 something soundeth in mine ears,

‘Abjure this magic, turn to God again ’.4

It is this anguish of uncertainty that strikes the note of
tragedy in the play. It is a venture into an uncharted
region which only Shakespeare was to explore thoroughly :
these faint tracks of the pioneer point the way to Hamlet.

As the play proceeds, the struggle deepens in intensity.

When I behold the heavens, then I repent,0

Faustus exclaims at one moment, and at the next :

1 Dr. Faustus, 162. ' 248-9. s 338-9.

1 433-40.

5 612.

MARLOWE’S

My heart’s so hardened I cannot repent :

Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven,

But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears
‘ Faustus, thou art damned V

The sensual baits with which Mephistophilis plies his victim
are subtly graded ; they give an element of artistic relief to
the phases of suffering and despair. The first attempt is
quite crude : — 1 Enter [Mephistophilis] with devils giving
crowns and rich apparel to Faustus, and dance, and then
depart ’.2 Something has been excised from the context — at
least a speech of the presenter. Marlowe, with all the rich
resoui'ces of blank verse at his command, did not dismiss
a temptation with a dumb show and eke it out with a line or
two of prose cut up into verse lengths.

4 Speak, Mephistophilis, what means this show ? ’

‘ Nothing, Faustus, but to delight thy mind withal,

And to show thee what magic can perform.’3

We are on firmer ground in the next temptation which
depicts the thrill of intellectual pleasure.

Have I not made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander’s love and Oenon’s death ?

And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp
Made music with my Mephistophilis?4

Next come the spectacle of the Seven Deadly Sins, signifi¬
cant in the choice of the performers, and the visit to Rome.
And throughout, like a mournful undertone, come reminders
of the approaching end :

Now, Mephistophilis, the restless course
That time doth run with calm and silent foot,
Shortening my days and thread of vital life,

Calls for the payment of my latest years.5

Then, as the climax of temptation and the final triumph of
the Fiend, is the summoning up to earth of Helen of Troy.
The rapture of the lost man finds utterance in some of the

1 629-32.
4 637-41.

2 After 514.
6 1106-9.

3 515-17.

TRAGICAL HISTORY OF HR. FAUSTUS 25

most exquisite lines that ever came from the pen of
Marlowe :

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium ? . . . .

Oh thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars ;

Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele,

More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azured arms ;

And none but thou shalt be my paramour.1

Instantly this radiant vision fades, and he passes to the
darkness of the end. The last scene reveals a flexibility of
style, a capacity for varying the range of the instrument, for
which we look in vain in the clanging verse of Tamburlaine.
It is a noteworthy advance in poetic art. The scene opens
significantly with a dialogue in prose. V ery little of the
prose which has come down to us as Marlowe’s can be
regarded as unquestionably his, but here at any rate I feel no
hesitation, and the point is important in view of Shake¬
speare’s practice later. Marlowe, reaching the crisis of his
play, pitches the first note in this quiet key.2 Faustus
enters with three scholars, who had been students with him at
Wittenberg ; one of them a close intimate, who had been his
chamber-fellow. Old memories stir within him at the sight
of them and effect a startling change : the world magician,
face to face with grim reality, becomes profoundly simple.
He turns, as any common man would turn, to his fellow men
for sympathy. ‘ Ah my sweet chamber-fellow ! had I lived
with thee, then had I lived still, but now I die, eternally :
look, comes he not ? Comes he not ? ’ They try to comfort
him 2 ‘ ’Tis but a surfeit — never fear, man.’ ‘ A surfeit of

deadly sin ’, he answers, ‘ that hath damned both body and
soul.’ He is advised to look up to heaven and trust God’s
infinite mercy. ‘ But Faustus’ offence can ne’er be pardoned.
The serpent that tempted Eve may be saved, but not
Faustus.’ His mind then travels back to his past life and

1 1328-9, 1341-7.

2 1359 ff.

MARLOWE’S

the use which he has made of it. ‘ Though my heart pants
and quivers to remember that I have been a student here
these thirty years, oh, would I had never seen Wertenberg,
never read book : and what wonders I have done, all
Germany can witness, yea, all the world, for which Faustus
hath lost both Germany, and the world — yea, heaven itself, —
heaven, the seat of God, the throne of the blessed, the
kingdom of joy, and must remain in hell for ever, — hell, ah
hell for ever? Sweet friends, what shall become of Faustus,
being in hell for ever ? ’ ‘Yet, Faustus, call on God.’ ‘ On God,
whom Faustus hath abjured, — on God, whom Faustus hath
blasphemed ! Ah, my God, I would weep, but the Devil
draws in my tears. Gush forth blood instead of tears — yea,
life and soul ! Oh he stays my tongue, I would lift up my
hands, but see, they hold them, they hold them ! ’

The prose is strong and vivid, and it is heightened by a
plangent note which makes it a tit prelude for the verse
which follows. Faustus is left alone, with but one hour to
live, and the conflict of feeling within him shows itself now
by a direct and simple line wrung from him by the im¬
minent horror of the end, and again by a sudden flight of
poetic fancy, the expression of his over-charged emotion :

Ah Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

And then thou must be damned, perpetually.

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come.

He prays that this final hour may be but

A year, a month, a week, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent, and save his soul.

0 lente, lente currite noctis equi.1

Here too his mind goes back to the past ; he is quoting Ovid,
the prayer of a lover in his mistress’s arms that the horses of
the chariot of the night may move slowly across the sky.
There is a grim irony in the application of it here ; it is
the agonized cry of the sensualist who had claimed Helen for
his paramour.

1 1426-8.

TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DR. FAUST US

Dream quickly gives way to reality, and the verse vividly
reflects the change. First, there is a line of monosyllables broken
by quiet pauses ; then the pent-up agony finds expression,
in turbid and broken rhythms. Nowhere in the whole range
of Marlowe’s work is there a sharper contrast to the normal
movement of his lines. The superb imaginative power of the
passage further deepens its artistic significance. A mirage of
blood — the blood of Christ, as Faustus supposes — flickers
before his straining eyes :

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

Oh I’ll leap up to my God : who pulls me down ?

See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament:

One drop would save my soul — half a drop — ah my Christ !

Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ :

Yet will I call on him — oh spare me, Lucifer ! 1

There is a rapid change of vision. He sees God frowning
angrily upon him ; and now he quotes, not Ovid, but the
Bible :

Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God.2

The half-hour strikes: spent with agony, he pleads for a
respite ; the voice dies away into a moan.

Oh God,

If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,

Yet for Christ’s sake, whose blood hath ransomed me,

Impose some end to my incessant pain.3

In this last interval his mind wanders off to a fanciful specu¬
lation about the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis.
In our ears this has a hollow ring at such a moment ; but we
must remember that Faustus is a supreme embodiment of
Renaissance feeling, and that in this point he faithfully
reflects the spirit of his creator. He is pouring out the
curses of despair when midnight strikes ; and as the thunder
peals and the lightning flashes around him, one last gleam of
poetry lights up his dying utterance :

1 1429-35.

2 1438-9.

3 1452-5.

MARLOWE’S

O soul, be changed into little water-drops,

And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found.1

The fiends rush in upon their prey, and he passes from human
view with a sharp convulsive wail hideous in its realism :

My God, my God, look not so fierce on me !

Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while !

Ugly hell, gape not ! Come not, Lucifer !

I'll burn my books — ah Mephistophilis ! 2

But the artist in Marlowe shrank from closing the tragedy
on that wild shriek of pain. The Chorus enters and in soft
tones speaks the dead scholar’s epitaph :

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.3

The last sound in our ears is the note of pure poetry.

The greatness of this closing scene may perhaps be recog¬
nized more clearly by briefly examining the attempts to
amplify it in a later playhouse version. I have quoted
throughout from the earliest extant text, the quarto of 1604.
But a much fuller version was published in 1610. This is
sometimes very helpful in supplying lines which have dropped
out of the carelessly printed text of its predecessor. But it is
heavily interpolated, and its alterations at the crisis of the
play are very instructive. In the first place the censor was
at work : he is an offensive creature at all times, but he is at
his worst when he hunts a religious trail. He excised the
great imaginative line,

See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.

He disapproved of the poignant appeal,

O God,

If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul.

The theology is quite harmless in his resetting of it,

Oh if my soul must suffer for my sin.

In Faustus’ final appeal, ‘Oh mercy, heaven !’ is substituted
for ‘ My God, my God ’ in the line

My God, my God, look not so fierce on me !

1 1472-3.

2 1474-7.

1478-9.

TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DR. FAUSTUS 29

In fact the good man was at pains to keep the deity out of
this questionable business as far as possible.

Next he devoted himself to touching up Marlowe’s de¬
fective metre.

One drop would save my soul — half a drop ! — ah my Christ !
This kind of thing, he felt, must be made into blank verse :
he made it, thus —

One drop of blood would save me, O my Christ !

In the line

O soul, be changed into little water-drops,
the slight hurry of the rhythm at the end of the line suggests
the movement of the shower of falling drops. The 1616
quarto reads

O soul, be changed into small water-drops !

But the supreme effort of the interpolator was to add two
scenes. In the original text the last persons to talk with
Faustus were his friends, the three scholars; they retired into
another room to pray for him.1 One would have thought
that, after the tremendous climax of his passing, no human
being could have felt the slightest interest in following these
minor characters any further. Faustus’ dismissal of them
had dramatic point : it was, for him, the snapping of all
human ties. But the reviser brought them in at the death,
with the fatuous remark that they had had the worst night

Since first the world’s creation did begin.2
Thereupon one of their number discovers Faustus’ limbs
scattered in fragments about the floor.

The treatment of Mephistophilis is even worse. In the
original his last and crowning temptation, which proves
completely successful, is to master Faustus with the lure of

1 In Mr. William Poel’s original revival of Faustus in 1896 the centre
of the platform was a curtained erection like the pageant stage of
the miracle plays. The scholars stepped outside this on to the plat¬
form and knelt there for the final scene, giving the effect of kneeling
figures in the lower lights of a stained-glass window.

2 Appendix, 1480.

MARLOWE’S

Helen’s beauty. Mephistophilis, now secure of his prey,
vanishes ; his work is done. The ‘ adders and serpents who
fetch Faustus’ soul, are underlings. But the more potent
spirit is not forgotten : the last cry of his victim as he is
driven to hell is to shriek out the words ‘ Ah Mephistophilis ! ’
Nothing more: but it sums up the series of temptations from
the moment, twenty-four years earlier, when Faustus first
conjured up this embodiment of evil and prided himself on
securing so meek a vassal :

How pliant is this Mephistophilis,

Full of obedience and humility !

Such is the force of magic, and my spells.1

Marlowe, when he wrote Doctor Faustus, was beginning to
study the subtle links of plot.

But the adapter intervened. He inserted between the
prose prelude on which I have commented and the tremendous
final speech an interlude in which Mephistophilis reappears
to mock his victim, seconded in this moral effort by the Good
and Bad Angels, who torture Faustus with peep-shows of
Heaven and Hell. The problem of the rival quartos involves
some serious difficulties which are not likely to be solved
unless we recover the lost quarto of 1601. Meanwhile we
must study the play in the earliest and least contaminated
text, the quarto of 1604, supplementing it with some genuine
fragments which are preserved in the text of 1616.

But even this earliest quarto is clogged with rewritten
scenes which read like a coarse burlesque of Marlowe’s main
motive. They are not comic episodes worked artistically
into the scheme of the play in order to provide an element
of contrast or relief. They contain nothing that suggests,
even remotely, any approach to the Shakespearian method by
which, with incomparable art, a comic scene or character not
only diversifies but deepens the tragic setting. Comedy in
any form, and I am afraid particularly in the form of horse¬
play, appealed to an audience on the Bankside ; and some¬
times, if their craving for it was not satisfied, there was
trouble at the theatre. Edmund Gayton, in his Pleasant

1 264-6.

TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DR. FAUSTUS

Notes upon DoF Quixote, published in 1651, describes the
humours of the seventeenth-century playgoer on a holiday
afternoon when, as he puts it, ‘ sailors, watermen, shoe¬
makers, butchers, and apprentices are at leisure It is inter¬
esting to learn that Marlowe took with such an audience.
‘ I have known upon one of these festivals, but especially at
Shrovetide, where the players have been appointed, notwith¬
standing their bills to the contrary, to act what the major
part of the company had a mind to — sometimes Tamerlane,
sometimes Jug urth, sometimes The Jew of Malta , and some¬
times parts of all these; none of the three taking, they were
forced to undress and put off their tragic habits, and conclude
the day with The Merry Milkmaids. And unless this were
done — as sometimes it so fortuned that the players were
refractory — the benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones,
oranges, apples, nuts flew about most liberally ! ’ 1 I quote
one more tribute which, 1 am sure, was taken from the life ;
it is interesting to find that, so late as 1625, the devils of the
old miracle plays were retained in affectionate remembrance.
In Jonson’s Staple of News - Gossip Tattle, airing her theories
of drama, says : ‘ My husband, Timothy Tattle — God rest his
poor soul ! — was wont to say there was no play without a
Fool or a Devil in’t; lie was for the Devil still, God bless
him ! The Devil for his money, would he say ; “ I would
fain see the Devil”’.2 If Master Timothy Tattle ever saw
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, he must have felt
for once that he had got his money’s worth : the play — at
least in the form in which we have it — abounds in fools and
devils. And stage-directions such as the following — 1 Beat
the Friars, and fling fireworks among them ’,3 or ‘ Enter
Mephistophilis ; sets squibs at their backs ; they run about ’ 4
— show very decisively the quality of the fun.

It would be ludicrous to credit Marlowe with the author¬
ship of this farcical element. Of course, the mere assertion
that the genius of Marlowe did not run in- the direction of

1 Pleasant Notes, p. 271.

1 Stujrfe of News, the first intermean.

3 After 903. 4 After 984

MARLOWE’S

comedy and that his worst extravagances, such as the scene
of the ‘ pampered jades ’ in Tamburlaine, betray a hopeless
lack of humour — though obviously suggestive as criticism — -
cannot be accepted off-hand as disproof of the attribution.
But we can point to some definite evidence. The most im¬
portant is the memorandum of the stage-manager Henslowe
that on November 22, 1602, he paid four pounds to William
Bird and Samuel Rowley ‘ for their adicyones in doctor
fostes’. Occasionally at the revival of an old play which
had had a successful run, and might therefore be stale to the
playgoer, a manager had a few new scenes inserted in this
way as an advertisement. Interpolation can actually be
traced in the 1604 text. In the eleventh scene is a reference
to Dr. Lopez, Queen Elizabeth’s physician, who was hanged
on the charge of attempting to poison her a year after
Marlowe’s death. There is at least one startling contradic¬
tion in the text : in the opening scene Philip is on the throne
of Spain ; in the tenth scene the Emperor Charles V appears.
There are also artistic considerations which point to the
divided authorship. In one part of the play five scenes in
succession — scenes vii to xi— are wholly or mainly comic.
No author gifted with any true creative faculty could thus
have thrown the serious side of his subject so completely out
of focus. The ninth scene can be proved not to be the work
of Marlowe. Robin, the ostler at an inn where presumably
Faustus is staying, — perhaps somewhere in Germany, but
the scene-locations are of the haziest — has stolen one of
Faustus’ conjuring books, and with it he raises Mephisto-
philis. Now it happens that in the third scene we have
already had Faustus conjuring. In the darkness of night he
makes a solemn invocation, using a Latin formula, and a
devil at once deludes him by appearing. This spirit is dis¬
missed to return in the shape of a Franciscan friar, and
proves to be Mephistophilis. He explains that he came to
Faustus, not in obedience to the incantation, but of his own
accord :

For when we hear one rack the name of God,

Abjure the Scriptures and his Saviour Christ,

TRAGICAL HISTORY OF HR. FAUSTUS

We fly, in hope to get his glorious soul ;

Nor will we come unless he use such means
Whereby he is in danger to be damned.

Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring
Is stoutly to abjure the Trinity
And pray devoutly to the Prince of Hell.1
That is to say, Faustus’ spells, which are just those of the
commonplace practitioner in magic, would of themselves
have been wholly ineffective, but Mephistophilis gives a
subtle and sinister reason for obeying them. When Robin
the clown tries his hand at conjuring, he mouths some
absolute gibberish which forces Mephistophilis to appear at
once and makes him complain bitterly to Lucifer,

From Constantinople am I hither come
Only for pleasure of these damned slaves.2
‘ How says Robin, quite unabashed, although a few minutes
before he had been running about in terror with burning
squibs tied to him, ‘from Constantinople? You have had
a great journey ; will you take sixpence in your purse to pay
for your supper, and be gone ? ’ Marlowe’s method of raising
the devil involved repudiation of the Trinity and devout
prayer to Lucifer : this vacuous buffoonery, whether it is
the work of Bird and Rowley or of an earlier interpolator,
has not even the merit of a parody.

Consider too Marlowe’s conception of hell. In spite of his
employing medieval machinery and crudely personifying
Conscience and Temptation in the archaic figures of the Good
and Bad Angels, his hell is essentially spiritual. His con¬
temporaries accepted the coarse material view of it as an
underground torture-chamber for the sinner in which his
worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. Marlowe put
aside this convention : he depicts hell as a phase of mental
suffering infinite in its scope and duration. Mephistophilis
with mordant irony explains this conception to Faustus
immediately after he has signed the bond to surrender his
soul :

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
i 282-9. 2 995 ff.

2339*14

34 MARLOWE’S TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DR. FAUSTUS

And where hell is must we ever be :

And to conclude, when all the world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell that is not heaven.1

A point like this shows us what Goethe meant when he said
of Marlowe’s play, ‘ How greatly it is all planned This
strength of conception, this clear outlook on the spiritual
heights, is not found again in English literature until Milton.
There are passages in the first and fourth books of Paradise
Lost which almost seem to echo Faustus. Satan’s cry of
anguish in his address to the Sun strikes this note :

Me miserable ! which way shall I fly

Infinite wrath and infinite despair ?

Which way I fly is Hell ; myself an Hell.

It would be hazardous to speculate what Milton might, and
might not, have read in his undergraduate days when he was
a student of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. It is possible
that he read this play, alien though much of it would be to
his Puritan temper. But of course a coincidence such as this
need not mean more than that two poets of genius, treating
in a very different medium the record of a lost soul, drew
independently on their shaping spirit of imagination and
emancipated themselves from the meanness of popular theo¬
logy. For his loftiness of conception no less than for the
deathless music of his verse we can think of Marlowe as
standing for one moment by the side of Milton. He could
earn no higher tribute.

Percy Simpson.

1 553-8.

JOHNSON’S IRENE

The Story

J~RENE is based on a story in The Generali Historie of the
Turlies, by Richard Knolles, a book which Johnson always
held in the highest regard, and praised in The Rambler as
displaying ‘ all the excellencies that narration can admit
But nowhere was he content to versify Knolles’s prose, and
from first to last his play is singularly deficient in allusions
to be illustrated, or difficulties to be explained, by consulting
the material on which he worked. It is the divergencies, not
the similarities, that are of interest, and they are character¬
istic. In general we may say that Johnson was indebted to
Knolles for little more than the suggestion of his Irene. He
did not write with a book lying open before him, but once
having found his subject let it take shape in his own mind.

The story which is told by Knolles in over three closely
packed folio pages may thus be given here in brief ; but there
is one paragraph which must be quoted in full, not so much
because it wins the attention of every reader and explains
Johnson’s praise of the narrative style, as because it shows
why Johnson could not follow the story as he found it. He
gave it a less violent climax, more in harmony with his idea
of the moral purpose of the drama.

According to the story, Irene, a Greek of incomparable
beauty and rare perfection, was made captive at the sack of
Constantinople in 1453, and handed over to the Sultan
Mahomet II, who took such delight in her that in a short
time she became the mistress and commander of the great
conqueror. ‘ Mars slept in Venus’ lap, and now the soldiers
might go play.’ He neglected the government of his empire
till the discontent of his subjects threatened the security of
his throne. Mustapha Bassa, his companion from childhood
and now his favoured counsellor, thereupon undertook to
warn him of his danger, and performed the difficult duty

C 2

JOHNSON’S IRENE

without incurring the effects of his anger. Torn awhile by
contrary passions, the Sultan came to a sudden decision, and
summoned a meeting of all the Bassas for the next day.

So the Bassa being departed, he after his wonted manner
went in vnto the Greeke, and solacing himselfe all that day and
the night following with her, made more of her than euer before :
and the more to please her, dined with her ; commanding, that
after dinner she should be attired with more sumptuous apparell
than euer she had before worne : and for the further gracing of
her, to be deckt with many most precious jewels of inestimable
valour. Whereunto the poore soule gladly obeyed, little think¬
ing that it was her funerall apparell. Now in the meane while,
Mustapha (altogither ignorant of the Sultans mind) had as he
was commanded, caused all the nobilitie, and commanders of
the men of warre, to be assembled into the great hall : euerie
man much marueiling, what should be the emperors meaning
therein, who had not of long so publikely shewed himselfe.
But being thus togither assembled, and euerie man according
as their minds gaue them, talking diuersly of the matter :
behold, the Sultan entred into the pallace leading the faire
Greeke by the hand ; who beside her incomparable beautie and
other the greatest graces of nature, adorned also with all that
curiositie could deuise, seemed not now to the beholders a mortal
wight, but some of the stately goddesses, whom the Poets in
their extacies describe. Thus comming togither into the midst
of the hall, and due reuerence vnto them done by al them there
present ; he stood still with the faire lady in his left hand, and
so furiously looking round about him, said vnto them : I vnder-
stand of your great discontentment, and that you all murmur and
grudge, for that I, ouercome with mine affection towards this so
faire a paragon, cannot withdraw my selfe from her presence : But
I would faine know which of you there is so temperat, that if he had
in his possession a thing so rare and precious, so louely and so faire,
would not he thrice aduised before he would forgo the same 1 Say
what you thinke : in the word of a Prince 1 giue you free lihertie so
to doe. But they all rapt with an incredible admiration to see
so faire a thing, the like whereof they had neuer before beheld,
said all with one consent, That he had with greater reason so
passed the time with her, than any man had to find fault there¬
with. Whereunto the barbarous prince answered : Well, hut
now I will make you to vnderstand how far you haue been deceiued

JOHNSON’S IRENE

in me, and that there is no earthly thing that can so much blind my
sences, or bereaue me of reason as not to see and understand what
beseemeth my high place and calling : yea I would you should all
know, that the honor and conquests of the Othoman kings my noble
progenitors, is so fixed in my brest, with such a desire in my selfe to
exceed the same, as that nothing but death is able to put it out of my
remembrance. And hauing so said, presently with one of his
hands catching the faire Greeke by the haire of the head, and
drawing his falchion with the other, at one blow strucke off her
head, to the great terror of them all. And hauing so done,
said vnto them : Now by this iudge whether your emperour is able to
bridle his affections or not. And within a while after, meaning
to discharge the rest of his choller, caused great preparation to
be made for the conquest of Peloponesvs, and the besieging of
Belgrade.1

Such is the story which Johnson transformed in his Irene.
This simple tale of lust and cruelty became in his hands a
drama of the struggle between virtue and weakness. Irene
is represented not as a helpless victim of the Sultan’s passion,
but as the mistress of her fate. Will she sacrifice her creed
to attain security and power ? She has freedom to decide.

Wilt thou descend, fair Daughter of Perfection,

To hear my Vows, and give Mankind a Queen?

To State and Pow’r I court thee, not to Ruin :

Smile on my Wishes, and command the Globe,

— so the Sultan woos her. In order that this freedom may
be emphasized, she is placed in contrast to Aspasia, a new
character for whom there is no warrant in the original story.
Aspasia is the voice of clear and unflinching virtue ; and she
is rewarded with her escape from slavery in company with
the lover of her choice. But Irene yields, and pays the
penalty. She hesitates, complies, and half repents, then is
betrayed and ordered to die. Her death is exhibited by
Johnson as the punishment of her weakness, whereas in
Knolles’s story it is but the fortuitous conclusion of helpless
misfortune. Even in his first serious work the great moralist,

1 Histone of the Turkes, first edition, 1603, p. 353.

JOHNSON’S I BENE

as he was soon to be called, converted a record of senseless
cruelty into a study of temptation.

When some twenty to thirty years later Johnson came to
edit Twelfth-Night he criticized the marriage of Olivia as
wanting credibility and as failing 1 to produce the proper
instruction required in the drama, as it exhibits no just
picture of life’. It was a juster picture of life that Irene
should be strangled at the Sultan’s orders for her supposed
treachery than decapitated by him without warning and
without reason in the presence of his admiring court ; and
he drew it so that there should be no mistake about ‘ the
proper instruction required in the drama In his criticism
of -4s You Like It he said that ‘ by hastening to the end of
his work Shakespeare suppressed the dialogue between the
usurper and the hermit, and lost an opportunity of exhibiting
a moral lesson in which he might have found matter worthy
of his highest powers’. Johnson never hastened in his Irene ,
and he never refused the chance of a moral lesson. Much of
the interest of his early drama lies in the illustrations which
it provides of his later critical precepts or observations, for
he held the same opinions throughout all his fifty years as an
author ; they show change only in the confidence with which
they are expressed. ‘ I do not see that The Bard promotes
any truth, moral or political ’ — so he said in his Life of Gray i
and if we want to know what he meant we cannot do better
than turn to his Irene.

Of the political truths it cannot be said — again to quote
the Life of Gray — that we have never seen them in any other
place; some of them were expressed elsewhere by Johnson
himself, and better. The downfall of a nation is due not so
much to the strength of the conqueror as to weakness and
vice at home,

A feeble Government, eluded Laws,

A factious Populace, luxurious Nobles,

And all the Maladies of sinking States.

Empires are weakened by the lust of conquest and possession :

Extended Empire, like expanded Gold,

Exchanges solid Strength for feeble Splendor.

-JOHNSON’S IRENE 39

In the perfect state all classes work together for the good of
the whole :

If there be any Land, as Fame reports,

Where common Laws restrain the Prince and Subject,

A happy Land, where circulating Pow’r

Flows through each Member of th’embodied State,

Sure, not unconscious of the mighty Blessing,

Her grateful Sons shine bright with ev’ry Virtue ;

Untainted with the Lust of Innovation,

Sure all unite to hold her League of Rule
Unbroken as the sacred Chain of Nature,

That links the jarring Elements in Peace.

This is a good statement of Johnson’s Tory creed, and none
the worse for the implied satire on the Whigs. It is the only
passage in Irene in which the political allusion is specific ;
and it is introduced cautiously, with the responsibility for the
anachronism thrown on the broad shoulders of Fame, for it
was not the English constitution in the days of the Wars of
the Roses that Johnson had in his mind to praise.

The moral truths abound. In The Beauties of the English
Drama, a collection of ‘ the most celebrated Passages, Solilo-
ques, Similies, Descriptions ’ which was published in 1777, no
fewer than thirty-two passages are given from Irene amount¬
ing in all to close on three hundred lines. Even of the best
we have to say that if they lend themselves to quotation,
they do not dwell on the memory. Johnson moves more
easily in the rhymed couplet than in blank verse, and is still
more forcible in prose.

The characters are said to be Turks and Greeks, but if they
were called by other names the play would lose nothing.
They are members, or attendants, of the great family of
tragic heroes of Drury Lane, and what they say has no local
or racial limits in its application. But the play was suggested
by a story that belongs to the year 1456, 1 and there is there¬
fore one allusion to the Renaissance :

1 According to Knolles’s narrative, Irene was captured at the siege of
Constantinople in 1453 and murdered just before the siege of Belgrade
in 1456. ‘This amorous passion induced the space of three continuall
yeres’ (Painter, Palace of Pleasure).

JOHNSON’S IRENE

The mighty Tuscan courts the banish’d Arts
To kind Italia’s hospitable Shades ;

There shall soft Pleasure wing th’excursive Soul,

And Peace propitious smile on fond Desire ;

There shall despotick Eloquence resume
Her ancient Empire o’er the yielding Heart ;

There Poetry shall tune her sacred Voice,

And wake from Ignorance the Western World.

This is the one clear indication of the time of the play, and
it may easily be missed. It was sufficient that Irene should
conform to these great postulates of the regular drama — that
human nature is everywhere much the same, and that what
may happen at one time may well happen at another. A story
laid in Constantinople in the middle of the fifteenth century
could be made rich in moral lessons for a London audience of
the eighteenth.

Johnson was not the first to make a drama out of Knolles’s
story. His is the fourth extant play on Irene in English.
The other three have long been forgotten, and at least one
of them is now not easily found. Here therefore are their
titles in full :

I. The Tragedy of The unhappy Fair Irene. By Gilbert Swin-
hoe, Esq; London : Printed by J. Streater, for J. Place, at
Furnifals Inn Gate, in Holborn, M.DC.LVIII.

II. Irena, A Tragedy, j Licensed, ^ Roger L’Estrange. |

London, Printed by Robert White for Octavian Pulleyn
Junior, at the sign of the Bible in St Pauls Churchyard near
the little North-door. 1664.

III. Irene ; Or, The Fair Greek, A Tragedy : As it is Acted at
the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane, By Her Majesty’s Sworn
Servants. London : Printed for John Bay ley at the Judge’s
Head in Chancery-Lane, near Fleetstreet. 1708.

The first of these is the crude work of a young North¬
umbrian, of whom little is now known beyond what may be

JOHNSON’S IRENE

learned from the commendatory verses.1 His Irene denies
the Sultan. She asks

but one Weeks respite,

To beg from our great Deity concurrence to your Yoak ;
and ‘ a pious Mufty ’ whom the Sultan had brought ‘ to joyn
our hands as well as hearts ’ decides that

This her Petition, in honour, cannot be deny’d.

The people rise to free the Sultan from her enchantments,
and he yields to their wishes.

The great content the Emperour took in her,

Made him lay by the great Affairs of State to court her :

At which the imperious Souldiers high incens’t,

Forc’t his unwilling hand to part her head and body.

Yet on the morrow of her murder she was to have been his
‘ royal bride ’. Irene had ‘ kept aloufe ’, and she died thinking
of a former lover. This youthful exercise in dramatic com¬
position was written at a time when there was little chance
of its being acted, and — we might add — could never have
been acted. Swinhoe was not well served by his printer ;
but no printer, and no prosodist, could have brought the
semblance of regularity into the verse — if so it may be called
— which is an odd jumble of groups of words divided as lines
and ranging from four to twent}^ syllables.

The anonymous author of Irena found in Knolles’s story
the opportunity for nothing less than a genuine Heroic Play.
The imperious Sultan becomes at his hands a love-sick swain,
whose only thought is to be 1 the more worthy to enjoy the
title of fair Irena’s servant ’. Irena is all Virtue, and Mahomet
is all Love and Honour. When his subjects rebel, his life is
saved by Irena’s chosen lover, to whom he resigns her in an
ecstasy of gratitude and magnanimity. Whereupon he is
rewarded with her commendation :

You’ve obtained more glory by thus conquering
Of your self, than ’ere you did by triumphing
O’re your enemies.

1 Cf. Jhe History of North Durham, by Janies Raine, 1852, p. 184, and
A History of Northumberland, vol. i, by Edward Bateson, 1898, p. 212,
and vol. v, by John Crawford Hodgson, 1899, p. 458 note.

JOHNSON’S IRENE

To protect himself from his subjects he has to appear to
kill Irena, but he kills a slave in her place. Another woman
character is introduced with the purpose of adding splendour
to Irena’s virtue, and emphasizing her nice observance of
‘ a Punctilio of Love and Constancy ’ ; and all ends happily
with a double marriage. The play is mainly in prose printed
as verse, but the monologues and the passages of argument
and repartee are occasionally in the rhymed couplet which
was then becoming the recognized metre of this form of
drama. It appears not to have been acted.

Such violent liberties were not taken by Charles Goring in
his Irene, or the Fair Greek. Here Irene laments her fate
from first to last. She has not yielded in her heart to the
Sultan, but her coldness and disdain keep alive his passion,
and when he kills her to allay the dissatisfaction of his sub¬
jects, he tells her to consider her murder ‘ th’ extremest Proof
of wondrous Love ’. The additional woman character is the
Queen Mother, whose jealousy has stirred up the opposition
that led to Irene’s death. The play — in normal blank verse
with occasional passages in rhyme — was produced at Drury
Lane on 9 February 1708, and ran for three nights. It was
successful enough to be twice quoted in Thesaurus Dra-
maticus 1 (1724), the first English anthology 1 confined to the
tragic muse ’.

The interest of these plays lies mainly, and to the reader
of Johnson perhaps wholly, in the treatment of the central
figure. There is no question of borrowing. None of them
owes anything to another, nor did they provide anything to
their greater successor. The two earlier plays Johnson may
be assumed not to have known ; if he happened to know
Goring’s, he certainly took nothing from it. Here ai'e four
independent renderings of Knolles’s story, and four distinct
presentations of the character of Irene. A comparison serves
to bring out in strong relief the characteristic moral quality
of Johnson’s work.

But the story of Irene was well known before Knolles

1 Expanded into The Beauties of the English Stage (1737), and The
Beauties of the English Drama (1777).

JOHNSON’S IRENE

wrote his history. There was a fifth play, the lost Elizabethan
play by George Peele, described in the Merrie conceited Jests
as ‘ the famous play of the Turkish Mahamet and Hyrin
the fair Greek Hyrin, or Hiren — a familiar term to the
Elizabethans, and long a puzzle to the annotators of Shake¬
speare — is none other than Irene.

It was Bandello who first told the story in print. He says
he heard it from Francesco Appiano, a doctor and learned
philosopher, the great-grandson of Francesco Appiano who
was doctor to Francesco Sforza II, Duke of Milan, and a
contemporary of Mahomet II. It may have little or no
foundation in fact ; it may well be only a revival of the
old story of Alexander, adapted to a century that was much
occupied with the amorousness and the cruelty of the Turk.
What alone concerns us here is that Bandello made it the
subject of his tenth novella, entitled • ‘ Maometto imperador
de’ turchi crudelmente ammazza una sua donna and first
published in 1554. The story soon spread throughout Europe.
A French version was given in 1559 in Histoires Tragiques
Extraictes des Oeuvres Italienv.es de Bandel, & mises en nostre
langue Francoise, par Pierre Boaistuciu surnomme Launay,
natif de Bretaigne, and was reprinted in 1564 in Belleforest’s
continuation and enlargement of Boaistuau’s collection. It
appeared in English in 1566 as the fortieth novel in Painter’s
Palace of Pleasure. Then it was swept up in the widespread
net of the Latin historians of Turkey. Martinus Crusius gave
it in his Turcogrsecise Libri Octo (Basle, 1584, pp. 101-2),
translating it from the French.1 Joachimus Camerarius, in
his De Rebus Turcicis (Frankfurt, 1598, p, 60), took it directly
from the Italian.2 In the Latin writers Knolles had authority
to include it in his majestic history. But he was not content
to work on the somewhat condensed versions which they
provided. He had recourse to Painter’s Palace of Pleasure,

1 ‘Excerpsi ex Gallica conuersione partis operum Italicorum Bandeli ’
(Crusius, 1584, p. 101).

2 ‘ Non potui facere quin adiicerem id quod in Italicis narrationibus
& de hoc Mahometha traditum reperissem’ (Camerarius, 1598, p. 60).

JOHNSON'S IRENE

and produced a skilful and even masterly rehandling of what
he read in that collection of stories.

That the lost Elizabethan play was founded on the novel
in The Palace of Pleasure is not a rash assumption. Bandello’s
‘Irenea ’ had become ‘ Hyrende ’ in the French of Boaistuau,
and ‘ Hyrenee ’ or ‘ Hirenee ’ in the English of Painter ; and
when Peele brought her on the English stage she was ‘ Hyrin ’
or ‘Hiren’. From the reference to the play in the Merrie
Jests, and from the vogue which the word suddenly acquired,
we can deduce something of the character of her part. She
must have differed widely from Johnson’s Irene, else her
name would not have supplied an already ample vocabulary
with a new term conveniently like ‘ syren

Johnson missed an opportunity when he edited Shake¬
speare. He did not suspect the relationship of Pistol’s Hiren
to the heroine of his own tragedy.

Composition atul Performance

Irene was produced under the name Mahomet and Irene at
Drury Lane Theatre on Monday, 6 February 1749, and had
a run of nine nights, the last performance taking place on
Monday, 20 February. It was acted on the intervening
Tuesdays (7, 14), Thursdays (9, 16), Saturdays (11, 18), and
Monday (13), the theatre being closed on the Wednesdays
and Fridays. Johnson’s three benefit nights were the 9th,
14th, and 20th. None of the theatre bills is known to have
been preserved, but in their place we have full announce¬
ments in The General Advertiser. From it we also learn that
Irene was published on Thursday, 16 February.

When Arthur Murphy wrote his four articles on Hawkins’s
edition of Johnson’s Works in The Monthly Review in 1787,
he stated in one of them that Irene was acted ‘in all thirteen
nights ’, as its run was uninterrupted from Monday the 6th to
Monday the 20th. This statement — and much more in these
articles — he repeated in his Essay on the Life and Genius of
Johnson in 1792.1 He forgot about Lent. In the eighteenth

1 Alexander Chalmers accuses Murphy of taking the greater part of
his Essay from the Monthly Reviewer without acknowledgement. But

JOHNSON’S IRENE

century the London theatres were closed in Lent on Wednes¬
days and Fridays, and in 1749 Ash Wednesday fell on
8 February.

Though not given to the public till 1749, Irene was the
earliest of Johnson’s more important works. He was engaged
on it while running his school at Edial, near Lichfield, and
had written ‘ a great part’ before he set out in March 1737
to seek his fortune in London. According to Boswell he had
written only three acts before his short stay at Greenwich,
and while there 1 used to compose, walking in the Park ’, but
he did not finish it till his return to Lichfield in the course of
the summer to settle his affairs. There is proof, however, that
the conclusion had been planned and partly written while he
was still at Edial. The manuscript of his first draft — now in
the British Museum — contains in somewhat haphazard order
matter that was ultimately worked up into each of the five
acts, or incorporated in them without change. All that can
be assigned to the spring and summer of 1737 is the com¬
pletion and revision of the play.

This manuscript is of particular interest as it is the only
first draft of any of Johnson’s major works 1 ; and it shows
the effort that Irene had cost him. As far as we know
he never took such pains again. The subject-matter of
each scene is written out in detail ; the characters are
described — some are named who were afterwards omitted ;
there are page references to authorities. Johnson had read

the Monthly Reviewer was Murphy himself. He returned to these articles
after the appearance of Boswell’s Lif e, to work them up into ‘ a short,
yet full, a faithful, yet temperate, history of Dr. Johnson ’.

It is only fair to Murphy to add that if he says ‘ thirteen nights ’ in
The Monthly Review for August 1787, p. 135, he had said ‘nine nights ’
in the April number, p. 290, and reverted to ‘ nine nights ’ in his Life of
Gat-rick, 1801, i, p. 163. The error would be negligible were it not that
it has recently cropped up again. In calculations of ‘ runs ’ in the
eighteenth century the time of the year must be taken into consideration.

1 The original draft and the second draft of The Plan of a Dictionary
of the English Language, 1747, are both in the possession of Mr. R. B.
Adam, of Buffalo, N. Y. (see the Catalogue of the Johnsonian Collection of
R. B. Adam, 1921) ; but the Plan is not a major work.

JOHNSON’S IRENE

widely in Knolles’s llistorie, and had at least consulted George
Sandys’s Relation of a Journey . . . Containing a description
of the Turkish Empire , 1615, and Herbelot’s Bibliotheque
Orientate, 1697.

Then came the trouble of getting the play brought upon
the stage. Peter Garrick, the actor’s elder brother, told
Boswell what he recollected in 1776, and Boswell jotted
down this in his Note Book :

Peter Garrick told me, that M1' Johnson went first to London
to see what could be made of his Tragedy of Irene that he
remembers his borrowing the Turkish history (I think Peter
said of him) in order to take the story of his Play out of it.
That he & Mr Johnson went to the Fountain tavern by them¬
selves, & Mr Johnson read it to him — This Mr Peter Garrick
told me at Lichfield Sunday 24 March 1776. . . . He said he
spoke to Fleetwood the Manager at Goodman’s Fields to receive
Irene. But Fleetwood would not read it ; probably as it was
not recommended by some great Patron.1

Both the Garricks used what influence they had with
Charles Fleetwood, the manager of Drury Lane Theatre, and
for some time they seemed likely to be successful. In a letter
to his wife on 31 January 1740, Johnson reported that

David wrote to me this day on the affair of Irene, who is at
last become a kind of Favourite among the Players. Mr. Flete-
wood promises to give a promise in writing that it shall be the
first next season, if it cannot be introduced now, and Chetwood
the Prompter is desirous of bargaining for the copy, and offers
fifty Guineas for the right of printing after it shall be played.
I hope it will at length reward me for my perplexities.2
It was only the promise of a promise, and Fleetwood was
an adept in the art of evasion. Next year we find Johnson
so far discouraged by the actors as to turn to the booksellers.
Edward Cave, always ready to assist his mainstay on The
Gentleman’ s Magazine , wrote thus to Thomas Birch on
9 September 1741 :

1 Boswell's Note Book 1776-1777 . . . Now first published from, the unique
original in the collection of R. B. Adam (ed. R. W. C.). The Oxford
Miscellany, 1925, p. 11.

2 Letters, ed. G. B. Hill, i, pp. 4, 5.

JOHNSON’S IRENE 4 7

I have put Mr J ohnson’s Play into Mr Gray’s Hands, in order
to sell it to him, if he is inclined to buy it, but I doubt whether
he will or not. He would dispose of Copy and whatever
Advantage may be made by acting it. Would your Society, or
any Gentleman or Body of men, that you know, take such a
Bargain? Both he and I are very unfit to deal with the Theatrical
Persons. Fletewood was to have acted it last Season, but
Johnson’s diffidence or prevented it.

Johnson was evidently abandoning hope of ever seeing the
play on the stage, and was resigned to get what money he
could for it by publication. But John Gray, the bookseller
who brought out Lillo’s pieces, would not buy it. A further
stage in despondency is reached when Johnson is content to
lend the manuscript to his friends. ‘ Keep Irene close, you
may send it back at your leisure ’ is what he wrote to John
Taylor, rector of Market Bosworth, on 10 June 1742.2

The turn in the fortunes of the play came when David
Garrick, his old pupil and friend, assumed the managership
of Drury Lane. Garrick had always been anxious to see
Irene given a chance, and now that he was under a special
debt for the great Prologue with which his managership had
been inaugurated, he decided to make it one of the features
of the next season. He chose a very strong cast, including
Barry, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Cibber, as well as himself ; and he
provided the further attraction of new dresses and stage-
decorations. ‘Never’, says Hawkins, ‘was there such a dis¬
play of eastern magnificence as this spectacle exhibited.’3
‘ The dresses ’, says Davies, ‘ were rich and magnificent, and
the scenes splendid and gay, such as were well adapted to
the inside of a Turkish seraglio; the view of the gardens
belonging to it was in the taste of eastern elegance.’4 The
main difficulty was to induce Johnson to consent to altera¬
tions which Garrick knew by experience to be necessary. He

1 British Museum, Birch MSS. 4302, f. 109; quoted with slight in-
accuracies, by Boswell, i, p. 153. There is a purposed blank in the manu¬
script after ‘ diffidence or ’ — not an illegible word, nor an obliteration,
nor a dash, nor a tear.

2 Letters, i, p. 11. s Life, 1787, p. 199.

4 Memoirs of Garrick, 1780, i, p. 120.

JOHNSON’S IRENE

told Boswell long afterwards that Johnson not only had not
the faculty of producing the impressions of tragedy, but that
he had not the sensibility to perceive them.1 ‘ When Johnson
writes tragedy he said to Murphy, ‘ declamation roars , and
passion sleeps ; when Shakespeare wrote, he dipped his pen
in his own heart.’ 2 Garrick knew that Irene would succeed
only by the efforts of the players ; and Johnson on his part
feared that their methods of enlivening the action would
detract from the seriousness of his purpose, and obscure the
worth of his studied lines. ‘Sir,’ he said indignantly, ‘the
fellow wants me to make Mahomet run mad, that he may
have an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his
heels.’3 We may believe that he was strengthened in his
indignation by the recollection of what he had recently
written about Savage’s experience with Colley Cibber —
‘ having little interest or reputation, he was obliged to sub¬
mit himself wholly to the players, and admit, with whatever
reluctance, the emendations of Mr. Cibber, which he always
considered as the disgrace of his performance ’.4 But Garrick
insisted, and Johnson had to yield. What these alterations
were, there is nothing now to show. The manuscript affords
no clue, as it is only a first draft ; nor does the book. Most
probably the play was printed exactly as it had been written.
The one alteration by Garrick of which there is record affects
only the action, and it had to be abandoned. This was the
strangling of Irene by a bow-string on the stage. The author
of a tragedy in which the scene does not change and all is
supposed to happen within one day 5 could be trusted not to
kill his heroine before the eyes of the audience, and must
have consented with no goodwill to so gross a violation of
the methods of the regular drama. As events proved, Garrick
had gone too far in his desire for stirring action. The

1 Life , ed. G. B. Hill, i, p. 198. 2 Essay , 1792, p. 53.

3 Life, i, p. 196.

4 Life of Mr. Richard Savage, 1744, p. 23 ; The Lives of the Poets, ed.
G. B. Hill, ii. 339.

6 According to the manuscript the Scene is ‘ a Garden near the Walls
of Constantinople ’, and the Time is ‘ Ten days after the taking of it ’

JOHNSON’S IRENE

strangling of Irene was at once greeted with cries of ‘Murder,
Murder though John Bull, as Charles Burney put it,1 will
allow a dramatic poet to stab or slay by hundreds, and her
death had to take place as Johnson had designed. From the
evidence of a Diary once in the possession of Mrs. Garrick,
the change was made after the second night :

Feb. 6, 1749. Irene. Written by Mr. Johnson — went off
very well for 4 Acts, the 5th Hiss’d generally.

Feb. 7. Ditto. 5th Act hiss’d again.2

Burney and Davies, however, both say that the offence was
removed after the first night. Garrick must have been
responsible also for the stage-name Mahomet and Irene.3

The play was received without enthusiasm. The most
adverse account is given by Hawkins who, always lukewarm,
says that it met with cold applause. Burney, a man of
warmer temperament, who was present at the first per¬
formance and several of the others, remembered that it was
much applauded the first night and that there was not the
least opposition after the death-scene had been removed.
But a letter from Aaron Hill to Mallet, written while the
play was in the middle of its run, shows that the chief
attraction to him — and we may presume to many others —
lay in the dresses and the acting :

‘ I was in town ’, he wrote on 15 February, ‘ at the Anamolous
(sic) Mr. Johnson’s benefit, and found the Play his proper repre¬
sentative, strong sense, ungrac’d by sweetness, or decorum :
Mr. Garrick made the most of a detach’d, and almost independent
character. He was elegantly dress’d, and charm’d me infinitely,
by an unexampled silent force of painted action ; and by a
peculiar touchingness, in cadency of voice, from exclamation,
sinking into pensive lownesses, that both surpriz’d, and inter-

1 In a note printed in the third edition of Boswell’s Life.

2 Sold at Puttick and Simpson’s on 11 July 1900, ‘ Catalogue of Auto¬
graph Letters and Documents’, p. 16.

3 Clearly in 1749 Mahomet and Irene was expected to draw larger
audiences than plain Irene would. But was the theatre manager playing
to the gulls, and thinking not merely of the Great Turk but also of his
popular little brother of the same name who is mentioned in the Drury
Lane Prologue ?

2339-14

JOHNSON’S IRENE

ested ! Mrs. Cibber, too, was beautifully dressed, and did the
utmost justice to her part. But I was sorry to see Mahomet
(in Mr. B-y) lose the influence of an attractive figure and degrade
the awfulness of an imperious Sultan, the impressive menace of
a martial conqueror, and the beseeching tendernesses of an amorous
sollicitor, by an unpointed restlessness of leaping levity, that
neither carried weight to suit his dignity, nor struck out purpose,
to express his passions?

Garrick had evidently no difficulty in carrying the per¬
formance to the sixth night. In order to carry it to the
ninth, so that Johnson might have three third-night benefits,
he had recourse to expedients which Johnson cannot have
liked. On the seventh night this grave tragedy was sup¬
plemented with lighter entertainment. It was not uncommon
at this time to add a farce to a serious play, and it is to the
credit of Irene to have survived to the sixth night without
such aid ; it was not uncommon also to add dancing ; but on
the seventh night Garrick added both a farce and dancing —
and Scotch dancing. According to the announcement in The
General Advertiser the play was presented —

With Entertainments of Dancing, particularly
The Scotch Dance by Mr Cooke, Mad. Anne Auretti, &c.

To which (by Desire) will be added a Farce, call’d
The ANATOMIST;

Or, The Sham-Doctor.

On the eighth night the Scotch Dance 2 was repeated, with
Garrick’s farce The Lying Valet ; on the ninth there were
‘ the Savoyard Dance by Mr. Matthews, Mr. Addison, &c.

1 Works of Aaron Hill, 1758, ii, pp. 355-6.

2 Dances were a l-ecognized means of swelling the audience on a
benefit night, and before Garrick’s time were added at the author’s risk.
According to The Prompter, no. cxv, 16 December 1735, the author some¬
times lost heavily : ‘Third Nights are so high, against an Author, that
unless he can make very considerable Interest, he may be in Danger of
losing, instead of gaining. The Expence of Dancers extraordinary, and
pantomimical Machinery, swell the Account to such a Height, that an
Author now, who accepts the Conditions of his Benefit, only games.
’Tis a Theatrical Pharoah, he may gain three times as much as he stakes ;
or he may lose his Stake, as well as his Time and Labour.' We need not
assume that Johnson ran any risk with the Scotch dancing.

JOHNSON’S IRENE

and Fielding’s farce The Virgin Unmasked. Short as this
run of nine nights may now appear, it compares not un¬
favourably with other runs about the same time. The
twenty nights of Cato in April and May 1713 still remained
the record for a tragedy. Thomson’s Tancred and Sigis-
munda (1745) had nine nights, and his Coriolanus, produced
immediately before Irene, had ten, and Aaron Hill’s Merope,
produced immediately after it, had nine with two additional
performances (one ‘ by particular desire ’, the other by royal
command) at intervals of a week; Moore’s Gamester (1753)
had ten with an eleventh a week later, Young’s Brothers
(1753) had nine, and Glover’s Boadicea (1753) had ten.1 The
mere number of performances is thus in itself no proof that
Irene had not succeeded on the stage. A more important
indication is that neither Garrick nor any other actor
thought of reviving it during Johnson’s lifetime. Nor, it
would appear, has it ever been acted since, though when it
was included in Bell’s British Theatre it was adorned with
a frontispiece representing Miss Wallis as Aspasia — a part
which she is not known to have played.

Financially, Johnson had no reason to consider Irene a
failure. The author of an original play produced at Drury
Lane during Garrick’s management was given the receipts
of a benefit night with a nominal deduction of sixty guineas
for the expenses of the house, though the expenses usually
came to about ninety.2 From a manuscript note by Isaac
Reed printed by Malone 3 we learn that after the theatre had
reserved its hundred and eighty guineas there remained for
Johnson as his profit on the three nights £195 17s. In ad-

1 Such numbers here as differ from those given in Genest’s English
Stage have been derived from the advertisements in The General
Advertiser and The Public Advertiser.

2 See Garrick’s letter to Smollett of 26 November 1757, printed in
Murphy’s Life of Garrick, 1801, ii, pp. 299-800.

3 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6th edition, 1811, i, p. 176. The note was
supplied to Malone, the editor of this edition, by Alexander Chalmers.
The receipts for the three benefit nights were £177 Is. 6 d., £106 4s. Od.,
and £101 11s. 6d„ making £384 17s. Od. in all, from which £189 0s. 0 d.
had to be deducted.

JOHNSON’S IRENE

dition lie received from Dodsley £100 for the copyright.
After twelve years of disappointment Irene thus at last
brought Johnson altogether about £300.

Criticisms of Irene immediately appeared in periodicals
and pamphlets. A long and laudatory letter which occupies
more than a column of The General Advertiser of 18 February
1749, speaks of it as ‘the best Tragedy, which this Age has
produced, for Sublimity of Thought, Harmony of Numbers,
Strength of Expression, a scrupulous Observation of Dramatic
Rules, the sudden Turn of Events, the tender and generous
Distress, the unexpected Catastrophe, and the extensive and
important Moral ’. The tone of the whole letter and such a
statement as ‘ all who admire Irene pay a Compliment to their
own Judgment’ suggest that it was written with more than
a critical purpose. Garrick probably knew something about
what was in. effect a skilful advertisement, issued at a time
when he was taking other means to ensure a third benefit
night. A more impartial but equally friendly account is the
‘ Plan and Specimens of Irene ’ which was published in The
Gentlemen’s Magazine for February when the play had been
withdrawn. It gives an elaborate analysis of the plot, and
after saying that ‘ to instance every moral which is inculcated
in this performance would be to transcribe the whole ’, cites
about a hundred and fifty lines with high praise. The play is
censured in respect of the design and the characters, but com¬
mended for the justice of the observations and the propriety
of the sentiments, in An Essay on Tragedy, with a Critical
Examen of Mahomet and Irene, an ineffective and now very
rare pamphlet published without the author’s name by Ralph
Griffiths on 8 March. Unfortunately no copy appears to be
now known of A Criticism on Mahomet and Irene. In
a Letter to the Author, which, according to announcements in
The General Advertiser, was ‘ printed and sold by W. Reeve,
in Fleet-Street ; and A. Dodd, opposite St. Clement’s Church,
in the Strand ’, and was published as early as 21 February.

The success of Irene fell far below Johnson’s hopes, but he
took his disappointment, in his well-known words, ‘ like the
Monument’. He continued to think well of what cost him more

JOHNSON’S IRENE

labour and anxiety than any other work of the same size, and
at least five quotations in the Dictionary (s. v. from, important,
imposture, intimidate, stagnant) testify to his parental fond¬
ness. Nor did he come to agree with the verdict of the
public till late in life, when, on hearing part of it read out,
he admitted that he ‘ thought it had been better ’} His final
judgement is clearly indicated in The Lives of the Poets. When
he said in the Life of Prior that ‘ tediousness is the most fatal
of all faults ’ and ‘ that which an author is least able to dis¬
cover and when in his Life of Addison he drew a distinction
between a poem in dialogue and a drama, and added that the
success of Cato had ‘ introduced or confirmed among us the
use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaft’ecting elegance, and
chill philosophy ’, we cannot but think that he remembered
his own Irene.

While Irene was still unacted, Johnson appears to have
thought of writing another tragedy. ‘ I propose ’, he said, in
a letter of 10 June 1742, ‘ to get Charles of Sweden ready for
this winter, and shall therefore, as I imagine, be much en¬
gaged for some months with the Dramatic Writers.’ 2 Nothin?

more is heard of this proposal. Johnson’s ‘ Charles XII ’
took nobler form in one of the great passages of The Vanity
of Human Wishes.

David Nichol Smith.

1 Life, ed. G. B. Hill, iv, p. 5. 2 Letters , i, p. 11.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

HE Brontes are not merely historical people who produced

A literature, they are themselves the heroines of a story
written partly by Mrs. Gaskell and partly by Charlotte and
enacted by the three sisters against a background of savage
moorland country or narrow Belgian life and always, as it
seems, beneath stormy or weeping skies. Their personalities
have the completeness, the consistency, the perfect congruity
alike with the background against which they stand, and with
the lives they led, that we expect in great works of art.
They have the immortality of the creations of the great
masters who ‘ living not ’ 1 can ne’er be dead ’. Because of
this one shrinks from disturbing that enchanted world in
which, like the sleepers in Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, they rest,
' age after age, mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecay¬
ing ’. And indeed of the sisters as heroines I can say nothing
that has not already been said far better.

I am going to attempt the perhaps less otiose but more
ungracious task of analysing Charlotte Bronte’s artistic
processes and estimating in cold abstraction from her perso¬
nality the value of her writing, her place in the history of the
evolution of the novel.

To Emily and Anne I shall often refer in so far as they
throw light on their elder sister’s development, but one
may suggest in passing that Emily was perhaps a greater
literary genius. Her characters and story are not mere
faintly disguised copies of the people she has met or of what
has happened to herself, and this power of invention — as
Charlotte recognized in criticizing the works of others — this
power of making one’s self the ‘ instrument’ of life and telling
a tale not verified in one’s own person, is proof of that plurality
of latent experience which is perhaps the best description of

genius.

Now the foundation of most of Charlotte’s work is simply
her own life and character, modified in the case of Jane Eyre

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 55

by the influence of certain literary models. She learned her
art in Jane Eyre and that book was used itself as a sort of
standard and pattern in its two successors. It is with this
process I propose to deal.

The use of the literary model is almost certainly due to
M. Heger’s method of teaching the two sisters. Mrs. Gaskell
writes, ‘ He proposed to read to them some of the master¬
pieces of the most celebrated French authors . . . and after
having thus impressed the complete effect of the whole, to
analyse the parts with them, pointing out in what such and
such author excelled, and where were the blemishes’. Then
a similar theme was given out and an exercise written in
imitation of the model. For example, one day he read to
them Victor Hugo’s Portrait of Mirabeau and then dismissed
them to choose the subject of a similar kind of portrait.
Charlotte Bronte’s imitation of this was a portrait of Peter
the Hei'mit. When M. Heger had explained his plan of
instruction to the Brontes, he asked for their comments.
‘ Emily spoke first ; and said, that she saw no good to be
derived from it; and that by adopting it they should lose
all originality of thought and expression.’ Charlotte also
doubted, but was willing to try, and it is clear that the plan
was adhered to, in spite of Emily’s objections. It seems
probable that Charlotte was convinced of its value : she
appears to have, as it were, got herself going in the compo¬
sition of Jane Eyre in something this way. Remember
Lucy Snowe’s description of her method. ‘ When Paul
dictated the trait on which the essay was to turn ... I had
no material for its treatment. But I got books, read of the
facts, laboriously constructed a skeleton out of the dry bones
of the real, and then clothed them and tried to breathe into
them life.’

The earliest written of the novels we now possess was The
Professor (this qualification is necessary, for Charlotte, like
her sisters, appears to have written hundreds of stories,
beginning in her extreme youth). It was not printed till two
years after her death (1857), but it had gone the round of
most of the publishing houses ten years before, while its

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

creator was engaged on Jane Eyre. No publisher would take
it, but one criticized it with courtesy and insight, and expressed
a wish to see a three-volume novel from the same hand.
The publishers appear to have complained of ‘ want of varied
interest’; and Charlotte Bronte writes that she has en¬
deavoured to impart a ‘ more vivid interest ’ to Jane Eyre.
This more vivid interest was given by crossing, as it were, her
own experience with stories she had heard or read, the chief
being Richardson’s Pamela.

Jane is a nursery governess and her social position as such
is nearly indistinguishable from that of Pamela as waiting-
woman to Mr. B.’s mother. Both habitually talk of the hero
as ‘ my Master ’ and are sent for to his presence. There is no
doubt that part of the success of Jane Eyre , as of Pamela,
was due to the romance of the rise of the heroine in social
position. Mrs. Fairfax corresponds closely to Mrs. Jervis —
the housekeeper who befriends Pamela. The house-party
with the egregious Miss Ingram has a parallel in the party
which comes to dine and inspect Pamela, and in Mr. B.’s
sister who objects to the marriage. Rochester plans and nearly
carries through a sham marriage with Jane, and Mr. B.
plots a sham marriage. Many of the scenes correspond
exactly, and it is amazing how many little points are repro¬
duced. For example, in Pamela one of the servants who
wishes Pamela well and cannot get access to her, disguises
himself as a gipsy, and, pretending to tell fortunes, brings her
a letter warning her about the mock-marriage. In Jane
Eyre Rochester disguises himself as a gipsy and, pretending
to tell Jane’s fortune, hints at the truth of his position. One
tiny point is significant of the method. In Pamela the gipsy
wishes to draw Pamela’s attention to the fact that she is going
to hide the letter in the grass, since she dare not give it to her
then. She does it thus : ‘ O ! said she, I cannot tell your
fortune : your hand is so white and fine, I cannot see the
lines : but said she, and stooping, pulled up a little tuft of
grass, I have a way for that : and so rubbed my hand with
the mould part of the tuft : Now, said she, I can see the lines.’

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

In Jane Eyre Rochester disguised as a gipsy asks for Jane’s
hand, and then says, ‘ It is too fine ... I can make nothing of
such a hand as that ; almost without lines ; besides what is
in a palm ? Destiny is not written there.’

There are five important interviews between Jane and
Rochester, after their relations have become intimate, in
which the love-story finds expression. These are : Firstly, the
walk in the garden at dawn after the night in which Mason
was attacked by his mad sister. They sit in an arbour
together and lie tells her his story, but in obscure language,
and tries to get her to approve the course he intends to take —
that of ignoring his marriage and uniting himself with her.
Then there is a scene in the orchard late at night, in which
Rochester proposes. Thirdly, there is the long conversation
the night after the interrupted marriage in which Rochester
tries to get her to live with him as his mistress. Lastly, we
have the two interviews at Ferndean. In the first, Jane, after
her long journey, is introduced by the housekeeper and finds
her master blind and ill. The final proposal is made when
they are out walking.

Now each of these is developed out of similar incidents in
Pamela. Pamela has interviews with Mr. B. in the garden
and in an arbour. He consults her as to the desirability of his
marrying, and on one of these occasions she believes him to
be aiming at a sham marriage, as Rochester really is in the
orchard scene. The scene at midnight after the interrupted
marriage corresponds to the elaborate proposals sent by Mr. B.
to Pamela, if she will live with him as his mistress. Again,
Jane’s meeting with Rochester at Ferndean is paralleled by
Pamela’s return when she hears that Mr. B. is ill, and by her
interview with him, introduced by Mrs. Jewkes. Lastly,
Pamela’s marriage is decided on during a long drive she takes
with her master, just as Rochester’s successful proposal is
made during a walk.

It is true that the mad wife was unknown to Richardson.
His obtuse moral sense saw no difficulty in rewarding Pamela
with the hand of the man who had tried every possible way
of ruining her, and whose own selfishness was the only barrier

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

to marriage with her. Charlotte Bronte had to find a fairly
adequate excuse for Rochester. Mrs. Gaskell thinks that
a local story was the source for this part of the plot. But
the whole incident is coloured by the practice of Mrs. Radcliffe
and her school. In The Sicilian Romance the heroine’s
wicked Father, in order to marry a lady with whom he has
fallen in love, keeps his wife shut up for years in an under¬
ground apartment. It is this episode which is the mainspring
of the satire in Northanger Abbey (one remembers that
Charlotte Bronte did not care for Jane Austen’s novels).
Catherine Morland being excluded, as she thinks, with guilty
care from the rooms of her host’s late wife, makes up her mind
that the lady still lives a prisoner in the Abbey. The general
sends his daughter and guest to bed, but announces that he
must sit up to read pamphlets. ‘ To be kept up for hours by
stupid pamphlets was not very likely. There must be some
deeper cause : something was to be done which could be done
only while the household slept ; and the probability that
Mrs. Tilney yet lived shut up for causes unknown, and
receiving from the pitiless hands of her husband a nightly
supply of coarse food, was the conclusion which necessarily
followed.’

We come upon other traces of Mrs. Radcliffe’s methods in
Villette. The ghostly nun, who turns out to be Genevra,
Fanshawe’s lover, masquerading, is in Mi's. Radcliffe’s worst
manner. Charlotte Bronte uses the nun to give a romantic
eeriness at various points, of which the most impressive is in
the explanation between Lucy and Mr. Paul in the Allde
ddfendue. The chapter ends : ‘ with a sort of angry rush —
close, close past our faces — swept swiftly the very nun herself.
Never had I seen her so clearly. She looked tall of stature,
and fierce of gesture. As she went the wind rose sobbing ;
the rain poured wild and cold ; the whole night seemed to
feel her.’ When we find that this apparition is a particularly
silly man whose masquerading effects nothing, we are outraged.

Scott in the Lives of the Novelists criticizes severely this
weakness of the School of Terror, but he himself offended in
the same way, and, as Charlotte Bronte admired him above all

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

other novelists he may have been her model here. There
seem always to have been, in her at least, and probably in
Emily also, two divergent tendencies — the one towards minute
and very accurate realism, and the other to what Mrs. Gaskell
characterizes as ‘ wild, weird writing’ ‘to the very borders of
delirium ’. She gives an example of this and, apparently
a little shocked, suggests that it may have some allegorical or
political reference :

It is well known that the Genii have declared that unless
they perform certain arduous duties every year, of a mysterious
nature, all the worlds in the firmament will be burned up, and
gathered together in one mighty globe, which will roll in solitary
grandeur through the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only
by the high princes of the Genii, till time shall be succeeded by
Eternity . . . that by their magic might they can reduce the
world to a desert, the purest waters too streams of livid poison,
and the clearest lakes to stagnant waters, the pestilential vapours
of which shall slay all living creatures, except the blood-thirsty
beast of the forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock.

This way of writing is the source of the romantic glamour
which runs through all Charlotte’s works, and leads her, for
example, in Shirley , to amazing bombastic passages ; but, as
I hope to show later, it was a necessary part of the full
expression of her genius. This sort of thing is not traceable
to Scott, but owes no doubt much to Southey’s epics and also
something to Beckford’s Vathelc. One cannot help feeling
that a better image of the fiery hunger of the Brontes’ natures,
of which they were themselves so acutely conscious, could not
be found than Beckford’s picture of the condemned beings
who wander for ever through nightmare halls with their
hands pressed to their flaming hearts. That Vathelc ran in
Charlotte’s mind is proved, I think, by her misleading
appreciation of the character of HeathclifF in Wuthering
Heights. ‘ HeathclifF’, she says, ‘ betrays one solitary human
feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine ; which is
a sentiment fierce and inhuman ; a passion such as might boil
and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius ; a fire that
might form the tormented centre — the ever-sufFering soul of

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

a magnate of the infernal world : and by its quenchless and
ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the decree which
dooms him to carry Hell with him wherever he wanders . . .
we should say he was child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but
a man’s shape animated by demon life — a Ghoul — an Afreet.’
Now this passage gives the impression of volcanic force in
the passions of Emily’s characters, but it is untrue and unfair
to Emily’s art. However true it may be that Withering
Heights grew out of the early fantastic tales imagined by
Emily, she has explained carefully how Heathcliff came to be
what he was. It is the result of the strange vicissitudes of
his childhood, fostered by the forbidding countryside in
which he grew up. In one of her poems we see her turning
from the fantastic — which always kept its hold on Charlotte —
to the stronger source of inspiration in her own nature :

To-day I will seek not the shadowy region ;

Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear ;

And visions rising, legion after legion,

Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,

And not in paths of high morality,

And not among the half-distinguished faces,

The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading :

It vexes me to choose another guide :

Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding ;

Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?

More glory and more grief than I can tell :

The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

To return to Jane Eyre. Starting from the story of the
first of the four volumes of Richardson’s Pamela, Charlotte
Bronte’s task was to make a three-volume novel of this
material and to create a sympathetic and really virtuous
heroine, and a hero who shall attempt an illegal union — one
becomes pedantic in Charlotte Bronte’s company — and yet

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

seem not unworthy of the heroine’s devotion. Pamela, whose
one real gift is beauty, and who is attracted to Mr. B. solely
by his wealth and position, is a designing minx. As Birrell
puts it, she ‘ was always read)- to marry anybody’s son, only
she must have the marriage lines to keep in her desk to show
to her dear parents ’. Charlotte Bronte had to make us
respect a girl who allowed herself to fall in love with a man
who had no intention of marrying her, and ultimately gave
herself to him.

Now this was attained largely by making the heroine’s
atti’action for the hero to be character and intellect — not
beauty. She had told her sisters that they ‘ were wrong —
even morally wrong — to make their heroines beautiful as
a matter of course ’. In a story like Jane Eyre it might have
been so, because it would have involved weakness — sensuality
— in the hero. The task therefore which she set herself was
to give, by dialogue chiefly, the impression of charm. Jane
wins Rochester by her courage, truthfulness, l’esource, trust¬
worthiness, but she keeps him by her wit. On the other
hand, when the book was first published, Jane’s passionate
desire to be loved was thought to be ‘ indelicate ’, even ‘ coarse ’.
It seems probable that the author — whose advice on love and
marriage in her letters is extremely early Victorian — must
have perceived the danger of this beforehand.

She met it by the account of the unhappy childhood. The
passionate misery of the orphan not only explains the love-
hunger but raises in the reader a strong desire to see her come
into her kingdom — it gets in fact the effect of a peripety.
But the space devoted to the childhood enabled her to give
a full-length portrait of the heroine, and since for that there
was no material in Pamela, she was thrown back on her
second source, her own experience. It is an admitted fact that
all the scenes at the school are bitter but accurate pictures of
the institution where four of the Bronte children spent some
time and which two of them left only to die. Aunt Reed and
her unpleasant offspring, one judges by the close correspondence
to pictures in Anne’s books, are portraits of households in
which one or other of the Bronte sisters suffered as aovernesses.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

It has not, I think, been pointed out so often that the third
part of the book — that is to say, from the flight from Thorn-
field to the return to the blind Rochester — the relations in
fact with the Rivers family — appears to be taken from
Charlotte’s relations with the Nussey family. Henry Nussey,
a clergyman, proposed to Charlotte. Charlotte’s answer, as
well as what she says on the subject to her dear friend — her
suitor’s sister — show that his offer, like that of St. John
Rivers, was scarcely that of a lover. ‘ He intimates ’, says
Charlotte to his sister, ‘ that in due time he should want
a wife to take care of his pupils, and frankly asks me to be
that wife.’ Compare with this Jane’s account to Diana of
her brother’s views in seeking her in marriage. ‘ His sole
idea in proposing to me is to procure a fitting fellow
labourer. . . .’ ‘ He has again and again explained that it is

not himself, but his office he wishes to mate. He has told me
I am formed for labour, not for love.’ We see by the com¬
parison the sort of modification made by art. Henry Nussey ’s
need was for a good housekeeper, to his own economic advan¬
tage, it might be felt ; there was no moral compulsion to assist
him, though she speaks of gratitude to his family. St. John
desired a helper for his cause, a sacrifice to be laid on the altar
of his stern Deity.

On the whole Miss Bronte was equally successful in dealing
with the difficulty of the hero’s character. Rochester is a
sort of Mr. B. crossed with M. Heger. His first marriage
is represented as having ruined his chances of innocent
happiness, the faithlessness of Adhle’s mother completes his
disillusionment. Further, the introduction of the egregious
St.John Rivers acts as a foil : we are ready to pardon anything
to an erring but passionate human being, after the presence
of the harsh fanatic,

The structure of Jane Eyre, then, appears to be this. We
start with the central episode of what may be termed
Rochester’s courtship at Thornfield framed on the model of
Mr. B.’s courtship of Pamela. The intellect and character of
Jane — her passionate love and yet power of restraint — is
what raises this part above Richardson’s novel. Then we find

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 63

that the hungry, unhappy childhood is needed to explain this
character, and further makes us feel the intensity of her rest
in love. But both our sense of proportion and the necessity
of making us respect the dramatis personae require that this
period of happiness should work up to a climax and peripety
(reversal of fortune), and be followed by a new period of agony.
Pamela falls to pieces because the marriage takes place too
soon, and what follows afterwards is merely a series of episodes.
Jane Eyre has the structure of a well-knit drama. The days
and nights of physical as well as mental starvation, followed
by the strange persecution of St. John, from whose grasp Jane
escapes as by a miracle, forms exactly the preparation we need
for the final happiness, intense and yet subdued, human and
yet of the spirit. Jane’s character which has held the book
together finds its consummation : ‘ I hold myself supremely
blest . . . because I am my husband’s life, as fully as he is
mine. ... To be together is for us to be at once as free as in
solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day
long: to talk to each other is only a more animated way of
thinking.’

In Shirley Charlotte Bronte made an attempt to break
away from her own inner life, but the extent to which she
relied upon immediate and particular observation is nowhere
more obvious. Shirley and Caroline are modelled on her
sisters Emily and Anne. Her deep love and admiration for
Emily — dead just about six months when the novel appeared—
enabled her to portray a nature essentially unlike her own.
That inspiration also enabled her to see her heroine in
circumstances unlike those of the sad reality — wealthy and in
a position of authority. When, however, it came to the love-
making her instinct failed her completely. Charlotte Bronte
apparently could not believe in any acceptable lover, who was
not at least in nature a schoolmaster. Even Rochester has
a touch of it. Shirley has been made so real to us that her
devotion to Louis — a stick at best — is merely ludicrous.

It seems to me just possible that Louis was an afterthought ;
that her first intention was to give Shirley to Robert Moore
and to let Caroline die of a broken heart. But the shadow

64 CHARLOTTE BRONTE

of the death of Anne which took place in May might well
alter her purpose. Mrs. Gaskell tells us that the first chapter
written after Anne’s death was the 24th — that called The
Valley of the Shadow — in which Caroline goes down to the
gates of death, but returns. Now Louis makes his first

o 7

appearance in the preceding chapter, and up to that point the
way has been prepared for the gradual decline of Caroline.
It would, I think, have been a greater book, if the author
had hardened her heart and gone on. But to use in a work
of art the clear impression imprinted by the agony of the
death of the prototype would naturally repel the bereaved
sister. Moreover, it might suggest to the world, should the
identity of the Bells be discovered, that Anne had died of
unrequited love. The idea would be intolerable. Never¬
theless the book falls to pieces because of this. Miss Sinclair
remarks on the difficulty of finding your way about in it — of
remembering where a particular scene comes.

You discern dimly an iron-grey Northern background drawn
with strokes hard yet blurred. . . . There is an incessant coming
and going of people who seem to have lost their way in the
twilight too. . . . There is a good deal of confused frame-breaking,
about which you do not care. . . . Presently Louis Moore appears
and the drama miraculously simplified leaps forward and be¬
comes alive, and moves forward under a strong but unsteady
light. You can find your way now.

Now this does give the general impression of the book, and it
is true that the course of the story becomes clear when Louis
appears, but it also becomes feeble — The Family Herald
inverted. Louis is a male Jane Eyre, or rather a male
Pamela, he even has Pamela’s passion for ‘ papers ’. He has
none of Jane’s wit and charm. The book was intended to be
on a wide canvas — to give the truth of the hard, wild, un¬
lovely Yorkshire world with its splendidly dreary background
of the moors. To depict Emily without that background was
simply not to give her at all. Charlotte Bronte writes : ‘ My
sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the
rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her — out of
a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side, her mind could make an

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 65

Eden. Mrs. Gaskell notes that Emily’s physical suffering
when away from Haworth was such that her family at last
acknowledged that whoever left home, she must stay there.
It is significant, then, that Louis’s courtship is conducted
entirely in the house. The story ought to have worked up
to a crisis in grand surroundings, and the end should have
been mainly gloom}7.

To her first three books Charlotte Bronte had, with per¬
haps a thought of sympathetic magic,— or a desire to comfort
herself,— given a happy ending. In Villette she went back
to herself as heroine, and was thus free to tell her tale with¬
out thinking what reflections it might cast on those dear to
her ; and Villette is her greatest book because in it the
essence of her passionate, gloomy race finds expression. Lucy
Snowe’s temperament is her fate, and is linked with the stormy
skies and seas which are the constant background of her
story and at last the terrific agent of her doom. The author
wrote to her publishers who had apparently pled for happi¬
ness for Lucy : 1 Lucy must not marry Dr. John ; he is far
too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and sweet-tempered ;
he is a “ curled darling ” of Nature and of Fortune ... he
must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody,
it must be the Professor — a man in whom there is much to
forgive, much to “put up with”. But I am not leniently
disposed towards Miss Frost : from the beginning I never
meant to appoint her lines in pleasant places ’—a fact which
ought to have been obvious to all. Mr. Bronte too pled for
a happy ending. ‘ But the idea of M. Paul Emanuel’s death
at sea was stamped on her imagination until it assumed the
distinct force of reality.’

The sound of wild winds and gloomy seas pervades the
book, and metaphors of storms at sea are found everywhere
sometimes rather irrelevantly. The note is struck early on
the night when Miss Marchmont dies.

I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional
great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and
small pains. Fate would not so be pacified : nor would Provi¬
dence sanction this shrinking sloth and cowardly indolence.

2339-14

66 CHARLOTTE BRONTE

One February night — I remember it well — there came a voice
near Miss Marchmont’s house, heard by every inmate, but
translated, perhaps, only by one. . . . The wind was wailing at
the windows : it had wailed all day ; but as night deepened, it
took a new tone — an accent keen, piercing, almost articulate
to the ear ; a plaint, piteous and disconsolate to the nerves,
trilled in every gust. ‘ Oh, hush ! hush ! ’ I said in my dis¬
turbed mind, dropping my work, and making a vain effort to
stop my ears against that subtle, searching cry. I had heard
that very voice ere this, and compulsory observation had forced
on me a theory as to what it boded. Three times in the course
of my life events had taught me that these strange accents in
the storm — this ruthless, hopeless cry — denote a coming state
of the atmosphere unpropitious to life.

The personality of the author is divided between Lucy
Snowe and Paulina, which accounts for the introduction of
the latter at the very beginning. Paulina’s misery on parting
from her father, and again at the indifference of Graham,
gives out the theme of heart-sickness that is to be the subject
of the book. Incidentally we notice that its effect, like the
parallel arrangement in Jane Eyre, is to give us a satisfaction
in Paulina’s marriage to Dr. John which would otherwise be
very feeble. But this is quite subordinate, the main intention
of the book is tragic. Miss Sinclair thinks that ‘ the marvel¬
lous chapters which tell of Polly’s childhood are manifestly
the prologue to a tragedy of which she is the unique heroine ’,
and that there had been a shifting of intention. A careful
study of Charlotte Bronte’s method leads me to disagree.
The subject of the book is heart-hunger, the inevitable
parting of all who love. Lucy Snowe is to be as it were the
organ which will take up the theme, but it is first given out
by the child Paulina, and by the story of Miss Marchmont.
Lucy Snowe herself appears out of a storm of misfortune, an
incarnation of affliction. ‘ I too well remember a time — a long
time — of cold, of danger, of contention. To this hour when
I have the nightmare, it repeats the rush and saltness of
briny waves in my throat, and thin icy pressure on my
lungs. . . . For many days and nights neither sun nor stars
appeared ; we cast with our hands the tackling out of the

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

ship ; a heavy tempest lay on us ; all hope that we should be
saved was taken away.’ That is our real introduction to
her. We know nothing about her previous history. One
notices that for the first time the hero or heroine does not
give the name to the book. Grief is the hero. The Professor
is the manifest germ of Villette, though the rather colourless
hero has no link with Paul Emanuel. He is a male Lucy
Snowe. But Madame Beck is foreshadowed in Mile. Reuter.
The appearance of the school itself : the Allde dbfendue with
the Professor’s window in the boys’ school looking out on it ;
the intolerable minxes, who make the first lesson a terror
to Lucy Snowe, recall the situation with which the male
Professor has to deal, and Lucy deals with the situation in the
same way, tearing up the minx’s exercise before the class.
But the dullness of which publishers had complained in The
Professor is relieved partly by the sheer intensity of emotion,
and partly by Charlotte Bronte’s greatest creation, M. Paul.
He lives — one would swear one had seen him. It was a
stroke of genius to make him ludicrous. For the mate of
a heroine she loved perhaps she would not have dared to do
it : we owe M. Paul to the fact that Lucy Snowe is the
embodiment of what was ominous in her own character, and
she did not love her. Dr. John was admittedly drawn from
the publisher Mr. Smith. One imagines that M. Paul may
have taken some traits from his subordinate Mr. Taylor, who
wished to marry Charlotte Bronte and whom she talks of
with gratitude and kindliness, but also with a faint tone of
amusement, and generally with the epithet ‘ little ’. Great
art is not so much 1 emotion recollected ’ as encased ‘ in tran¬
quillity ’. Her detachment from the model gave the author
the necessary calmness of perception : the element of laughter
in which M. Paul is portrayed gives him his vitality. The
scenes in which his generosity is dwelt on, might have been
written by any one and almost of any character. M. Paul
lives because of three scenes in which he is childishly vain,
touchy, prying, ridiculous. There is the evening reading,
when because Lucy moves a little away from him he clears
the whole long table and sets her at one end and himself at

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

the other. Still better is the scene on the occasion of his
fete. The little man hidden behind the pyramid of nosegays
and awaiting in vain Lucy’s addition to his triumph has an
intense pathos and life, because we never identify ourselves
with him. But perhaps best of all is the reconciliation.
Lucy finds him prying in her desk, and he pleads with her
that she might have spent a few centimes on a gift for him.
She produces a little sweetmeat box and a watch-guard which
she has made for him. 1 He took out the chain— a trifle
indeed as to value, but glossy with silk and sparkling with
beads. He liked that too — admired it artlessly, like a child.’
Then, having ascertained that it had always been intended
for him, ‘ straightway Monsieur opened his paletot, arranged
the guard splendidly across his chest, displaying as much and
suppressing as little as he could, for lie had no notion of con¬
cealing what he admired and thought decorative ’.

But the true greatness of the book is that here Charlotte
expresses fully the tormented agony of soul of the Bronte
sisters — agony of living beings as it were imprisoned in
vacuity. One remembers the description of Jane Eyre as
she paces the gallery in Mr. Rochester’s house before her
love-story has begun.

The restlessness was in my very nature ; it agitated me to
pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the
corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards . . . and
allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose
before it ... to let my heart be heaved by the exultant move¬
ment, which while it swelled it in trouble expanded it with
life ; and best of all to open my inward ear to a tale that was
never ended — a tale my imagination created, and narrated con¬
tinuously ; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that
I desired and had not in my actual existence.

Accurate truth to life had always been Charlotte’s artistic
ideal. ‘The Bells’, she writes in 1848, ‘are very sincere in
their worship of Truth, and they hope to apply themselves to
the consideration of Art, so as to attain one day the power
of speaking the language of conviction in the accents of
persuasion ; though they rather apprehend that, whatever

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 69

pains they take to modify and soften, an abrupt word or
vehement tone will now and then occur to startle ears polite.’
The fact was that her emotions were so intense, in spite of
the humdrum quality of the external incidents of her life,
that this truth to life involved the inclusion of a poetic
quality. She speaks almost with dislike of Jane Austen.
‘ What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her
to study , but what the blood rushes through, what is the
unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death — this
Miss Austen ignores.’ And again to Lewis, ‘ Miss Austen
being as you say, without “ sentiment”, without poetry, may¬
be is sensible, real (more real than true), but she cannot be
gi’eat ’.

To express herself, then, it was necessary somehow to give
utterance to the poetic quality in her. In the earlier books
this was undoubtedly a source of weakness. It was apt to
produce purple patches of the worst description. It found
voice in those terrible * devoirs ’ of Shirley and Mile. Henri ;
in Jane Eyre’s ‘pictures’; in personifications; and is re¬
sponsible probably for the scene with the nun to which
I referred above. But for the most part Villette is free of
this vice because in it the temperament of Lucy Snowe and
her agonies of loneliness and melancholy become a perfect
vehicle for this pressure of feeling. The subject of the agony
of a soul yearning for an object, for a mate, and condemned
to perpetual disappointment, to perpetual imprisonment in
vacuity, not only welds all the incidents in the book together
in the white heat of a passionate consciousness, but afforut,
constant opportunities for that uprush of emotion which had
done so much wrong to her art in earlier works. It is true
that the greatest passages are spoilt by the irritating trick of
verbal inversion — a trick learned perhaps from De Quincey,
whose Vision of Sudden Death had appeared in 1849, when it
was only too likely to come home to Charlotte Bronte. But apart
from that, De Quincey’s influence was probably for good — he
taught Charlotte Bronte how to utter the vague and yet over¬
whelming sorrows of her heart. The following passage gives
poignantly the sense of a gloom sublime in its intensity, and

70 CHARLOTTE BRONTE

rising out of the general atmosphere and theme of the tale,
as a stormy wind grows gradually to a climax of frenzy :

About this time the Indian summer closed and the equinoctial
storms began ; and for nine dark and wet days, of which the
hours rushed on all turbulent, deaf, dishevelled — bewildered
with sounding hurricane — I lay in a strange fever of the nerves
and blood. Sleep went quite away. I used to rise in the night,
look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return. A rattle
of the window, a cry of the blast only replied. Sleep never
came.

I err. She came once, but in anger. . . . By the clock of
St. Jean Baptiste, that dream remained scarce 15 minutes —
a brief space, but sufficing to wring my whole frame with un¬
known anguish ; to confer a nameless experience that had the
hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from
Eternity.

The external history of Lucy Snowe is neither the cause of
her inner experience, nor its result, but merely a minor varia¬
tion, as it were, on the same theme. This gives impersonality
to her emotion. At last Charlotte Bronte has found means to
transcend the bonds of the individual. This latest heroine,
stripped of every adornment and attraction, destitute even
of the possession of tragic affliction, the incarnation of
frustrated desire, becomes the mouthpiece of a great abstract
flood of emotion and gives utterance to the Infinity within
her creator. The intensity of pain in Villette guarantees its
author’s immortality.

There is not room for death.

Janet Spens.

TENNYSON AND WALES

1. His Tours in Wales

BOTH by his travels and his works Tennyson is associated
with Wales. He appears to have made his first visit in
1839, at a time when he was still labouring under the burden
of sorrow which the death of his friend Hallam had imposed
upon him. At all times a lover of quiet and seclusion,
Tennyson was then in greater need than ever of peaceful
solitude.

On this tour he visited Aberystwyth, Barmouth, and Llan-
beris. His account of Aberystwyth is not enthusiastic, though
he was interested to see the quaint costume of the women and
to hear Welsh spoken about him. He had chanced upon a
spell of serene blue skies, golden sunshine, and placid waters.
This was not to his taste. He loved the ‘ much-sounding sea ’
and was disappointed that the bay of Aberystwyth did not
show more of the tempestuous spirit for which it was re¬
nowned. Nor was he more fortunate with the literature
which came into his hands during his stay. He appears to
have stumbled upon T. J. L. Prichard’s poem The Land
Beneath the Sea and was moved to laughter by this unin¬
spired version of the legend of Seithenyn. It is tempting to
speculate what Tennyson might have made of the theme, if
it had come to his notice in some more suggestive form. As
it was, the inspiration which Welsh tradition was to give
him sprang from a different source — the deeds of Arthur and
his knights.

Weary of the unchanging, tranquil sea, Tennyson involun¬
tarily turned his thoughts to Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire,
where he had so often listened to the booming of the waves
as they fell on the shore. What he had longed for and lacked
at Aberystwyth he found at Barmouth, which rose corre¬
spondingly in his esteem. He describes it as ‘a good deal
prettier place than Aberystwyth, a flat sand shore, a sea

TENNYSON AND WALES

with breakers, looking Mablethorpe-like, and sand hills, and
close behind them huge crags, and a long estuary with cloud-
capt hills running up as far as Dolgelley, with Cader Idris on
one side ’. But more than anything else that benny son saw
on this tour Llanberis appealed to him, and remembering the
sombre and majestic setting of the mountain lake, as yet
undefiled by unsightly heaps of refuse from the slate quarries,
we cannot find this difficult to understand.

By the time that Tennyson made his second tour in Wales,
in 1856, he had apparently acquired some familiarity with
Welsh song. In June of that year, when confronted with
ruin, owing to the probable failure of the bank in which his
money was invested, he sought consolation in the stirring
‘ War-March of Captain Morgan ’. That summer he returned
to his old haunts, Barmouth and Dolgelley. The still
pools of the stream in the Torrent Walk at Dolgelley, the
mysterious giant steps of Cwm Bychan, and ‘ the high
rejoicing lines of Cader Idris’ were all a source of wonder
and delight. His wife records in her diary how, when climb¬
ing Cader Idris, he was caught in a sudden rainstorm,
which blotted out everything from the family anxiously
waiting below. ‘ I heard the roar of waters, streams, and
cataracts ’, she says, ‘ and I never saw anything more awful
than that great veil of rain drawn straight over Cader Idris,
pale light at the lower edge. It looked as if death were
behind it, and made me shudder when I thought he was
there.’ However, Tennyson sent a reassuring message by his
guide and ultimately joined his family in safety. Other
places visited by the poet were Harlech, Festiniog, Llanidloes,
Builth, and Caerleon. The last-named, with its Roman remains
and memories of Arthur, made a deep impression on Tennyson.
In a letter written amid the quiet of this ruined shrine of
former greatness, he says, ‘ The Usk murmurs by my windows,
and I sit like King Arthur in Caerleon ’. From Caerleon
excursions were made to Merthyr Tydvil, to Raglan, and to
Caerphilly, and then the party returned home through Brecon,
Gloucester, and Salisbury.

Twelve years later Tennyson again came to Caerphilly and

TENNYSON AND WALES 73

also visited Chepstow and Tintern. He beheld the ruins of
the old abbey and the expanse of the surrounding country
at much the same season as Wordsworth did seventy years
before. Through the bare windows of the abbey he saw the
golden cornfields, and, as he climbed an adjacent height,
watched the Wye force its way past bluffs crowned with
dark woods towards its junction with the Severn.

In 1871 Tennyson made yet another tour in Wales, this
time in the north. Leaving home on 7 August, he broke his
journey at Wrexham to stay with Mr. Archibald Peel, who
had enjoyed his friendship for some twenty years. From
here he went on to Llanberis. At the hotel where he put up,
he was disturbed by the dancing of a jovial party in the room
above his own, and in a letter humorously refers to the inci¬
dent :

Dancing above was heard, heavy feet to the sound of a light air,

Light were the feet, no doubt, but floors were misrepresenting.

Early the following morning Tennyson set out from Llan¬
beris and walked through Nant Gwynant to Beddgelert. He
records his impressions thus :

Walked to the Yale Gwynant, Llyn Gwynant shone very
distant

Touched by the morning sun, great mountains glorying o’er it,

Moel Hebog loom’d out, and Siabod tower’d up in sether :

Liked Beddgelert much, flat green with murmur of waters,

Bathed in a deep still pool not far from Pont Aberglaslyn —

(Ravens croak’d, and took white, human skin for a lambkin).

Then we I’eturned. — What a day ! Many more if fate will
allow it.

When Tennyson came to write his tales of Arthur and his
knights, the landscapes that he had seen in Wales would
naturally rise before his eyes and form the background of
some of his Idylls. From Malory he had imbibed the idealized
conception of a feudal ruler whose fame for bravery and
courtesy had spread through many lands and whose knights
were devoted to his service. Tennyson, gazing upon the ruins
of castles raised by Norman kings and nobles, peopled them
with visions of the figures that he had come to love in

TENNYSON AND WALES

medieval legend. It is conceivable that such a castle as is
described in The Marriage of Geraint is a reminiscence of his
Welsh tours :

Then rode Geraint into the castle court,

His charger trampling many a prickly star
Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones.

He look’d and saw that all was ruinous.

Here stood a shatter’d archway plumed with fern ;

And here had fallen a great part of a tower,

Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff,

And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers ;

And high above a piece of turret stair,

Worn by the feet that now were silent, wound
Bare to the sun, and monstrous ivy-stems
Claspt the gray walls with hairy-fibred arms,

And suck’d the joining of the stones, and look’d
A knot, beneath, of snakes, aloft, a grove.

Whatever scene may have prompted this description as
a whole, we know that the concluding lines were suggested
by the sight of the ivy-covered ruins of Tintern Abbey. In
various ways this spot was of especial significance to Tennyson.
In the first place it formed the background of one of Words¬
worth’s greatest poems, for which, in spite of the fault that
he found with its over-lengthy opening, Tennyson had a pro¬
found admiration. Again, Tintern had a personal claim upon
him. Not far away, on the opposite side of the Bristol
Channel, was Clevedon, in whose lonely church on the hill
overlooking the broad, flowing waters where the Severn joins
the sea, lay the remains of Arthur Hallam. Inevitably, when
the poet visited Tintern, his mind wandered to the friend
whose body had been conveyed from Vienna to its final
resting-place by this western shore, and he composed the
beautiful lines which afterwards appeared in the nineteenth
canto of In Memoriam :

The Danube to the Severn gave

The darken’d heart that beat no more ;

They laid him by the pleasant shore,

And in the hearing of the wave.

TENNYSON AND WALES

There twice a day the Severn fills ;

The salt sea- water passes by,

And hushes half the babbling Wye,

And makes a silence in the hills.

The Wye is hush’d nor moved along,

And hush’d my deepest grief of all,

When fill’d with tears that cannot fall,

I brim with sorrow drowning song.

The tide flows down, the wave again
Is vocal in its wooded walls ;

My deeper anguish also falls,

And I can speak a little then.

Another of Tennyson’s poems inspired by Tintern Abbey
was Tears, idle tears. At the sight of the magnificent ruins
and of the golden cornfields stretching around him, he
was seized with a feeling of regret -for the passing of all
that is fair to look upon. Possibly the memory of Hallam
subconsciously lent an added poignancy to this mood of
tender longing. However, Tennyson informed Locker-
Lampson that what moved him to write the poem was not
real woe, but rather the yearning that young people occa¬
sionally experience for that which seems to have departed
for ever. This feeling, which was especially strong in Tenny¬
son as a youth, finds expression in the lines :

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Eise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn-fields
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Tennyson’s visit to the Welsh coast in 1839 gave rise to
a beautiful simile in The Princess. It occurs in the second
part, in the description of Lady Blanche’s daughter, the
lovely Melissa, who has come with a message from her
mother. She stands hesitating upon the threshold :

with her lips apart,

And all her thoughts as fair within her eyes,

As bottom agates seen to wave and float
In crystal currents of clear morning seas.

TENNYSON AND WALES

In reply to some wiseacres who would have it that the
simile was taken partly from Beaumont and Fletcher, partly
from Shakespeare, Tennyson stated that it was founded on
his own observations while bathing in Wales.

The place which suggested this passage might have been
either Barmouth or Aberystwyth. There can be no such
doubt concerning the scene which inspired Canto 86 of In
Memoriam. It was Barmouth, and presumably on the occa¬
sion of the poet’s first tour in 1839. On a beautiful evening
he stands and gazes out to sea. Between two promontories
the tide flows calmly along, a west wind gently wafts the
rich fragrance of summer flowers after rain, the solemn shades
of evening descend, and far away, bathed in the mysterious
light of the setting sun, gleams the rising star. To the heart
of the poet, lacerated by memories of his lost friend, comes
a feeling of harmony long unknown :

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,

That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare

The round of space, and rapt below
Thro’ all the dewy-tassell'd wood,

And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows and blow

The fever from my cheek, and sigh

The full new life that feeds thy breath
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,

Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

From belt to belt of crimson seas

On leagues of odour streaming far,

To where in yonder orient star
A hundred spirits whisper ‘ Peace ’.

This evening at Barmouth was evidently a supreme and
unforgettable spiritual experience. At Llanberis Tennyson
had no moments of such intense and sublime ecstasy, but in
his poems there are several reminiscences of his stay there.
Edwin Morris was written at Llanberis, which Tennyson has

TENNYSON AND WALES 77

taken as the setting of the poem. He speaks of the bracken
rusted on the crags and of a ruined castle, presumably the
old stronghold of Dolbadarn :

built

When men knew how to build, upon a rock
With turrets lichen-gilded like a rock.

At the end of the poem the lover, fondly recalling his blissful
rambles by the lake, says :

In the dust and drouth of London life
She moves among my visions of the lake,

While the prime swallow dips his wing, or then

A bile the gold-lily blows, and overhead

The light cloud smoulders on the summer crag.

It would, of course, be foolish to apply these lines literally
to the poet himself, but it is perhaps permissible to read in
them something of the delight which we know Tennyson to
have felt in this mountain retreat. Though Edwin Morris is
but one of Tennyson’s minor poems, the last line is striking
in its beauty and fitness.

Llanberis is also the scene of The Golden Year, another
of the early poems. The poet tells how he and 1 old James’
had been up Snowdon and on their descent found Leonard at
Llanberis. With him they crossed between Llyn Padarn and
Llyn Peris and climbed the hill on the opposite side. The
poem ends with a description of the blasting in the hills,
whose mighty echoes come as an effective contrast to the
heated arguments which these puny mortals have just been
putting forth :

He spoke ; and, high above, I heard them blast
The steep slate-quarry, and the great echo flap
And buffet round the hills, from bluff to bluff.

Yet another reminiscence of Llanberis appears in The
Sisters. Tennyson revives the memory of the summer night
when first he saw it by the gleam of lightning piercing the
darkness, and draws from it support for the view that love
at first sight for a face seen but a moment and then gone
though strange, is possible. Once, he says :

TENNYSON AND WALES

when first

I came on lake Llanberris in the dark,

A moonless night with storm — one lightning-fork
Flash’d out the lake ; and tho’ I loiter’d there
The full day after, yet in retrospect
That less than momentary thunder-sketch
Of lake and mountain conquers all the day.

The mention of Llanberis inevitably brings Snowdon to the
mind, and Snowdon also figures in Tennyson’s poetry. In the
seventh part of The Princess the Lady Ida is shown mourn¬
ing over the collapse of her ideals. She climbs to the roof
and looking down sees her woman’s sanctuary overrun by
men. To emphasize her helplessness Tennyson introduces as
a simile the sudden storm which he once witnessed from the
top of Snowdon as he gazed over the neighbouring mountains
to the coast and the sea beyond. Ida is

As one that climbs a peak to gaze
O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night,

Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore,

And suck the blinding splendour from the sand,

And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn
Expunge the world.

Though no locality is this time specified, the hills of Wales
again rise before Tennyson’s eye in Sir John Oldcastle. He
pictures the zealous reformer, who at the beginning of the
fifteenth century has fled from the Tower and sought a
refuge among the Welsh mountains. Oldcastle wanders about,
enduring great hardships patiently and cheerfully, uplifted
by his faith in God and his hope in the future :

God is with me in this wilderness,

These wet black passes and foam-churning chasms —

And God’s free air, and hope of better things.

Oldcastle wishes that he could speak the tongue of those
among whom he now wanders in exile, not for the purpose
of winning them to the true faith, though he contemplates
doing so at some future season, but to satisfy his gnawing
hunger. As it is, no sooner is his English accent heard than

TENNYSON AND WALES

memories of bloody feuds not yet appeased prompt a sullen
refusal of his request for bread :

I would I knew their speech ; not now to glean,

Not now — I hope to do it — some scatter’d ears,

Some ears for Christ in this wild field of Wales —

But, bread, merely for bread. This tongue that wagg’d
They said with such heretical arrogance
Against the proud archbishop Arundel —

So much God’s cause was fluent in it — is here
But as a Latin Bible to the crowd ;

‘ Bara ! ’ 1 — what use ? The shepherd, when I speak,

Vailing a sudden eyelid with his hard

‘Dim Saesneg’2 passes, wroth at things of old —

No fault of mine. Had he God’s word in Welsh
He might be kindlier ; happily come the day !

As may be seen from this poem, Tennyson possessed some
knowledge of the Welsh tongue and in Geraint and Enid his
ti'ansformation of the brutal earl’s name from its Welsh form
to the English Doorm proves his familiarity with Welsh pro¬
nunciation. The Marriage of Geraint and Geraint and Enid,
originally published as one poem under the name of Enid,
were practically completed during Tennyson’s tour of 1856.
It is but natural therefore that these poems should be un¬
usually rich in allusions to Welsh scenes. In The Marriage
of Geraint the hero is so inspired by his love for Enid that,
when he challenges the Knight of the Sparrow-Hawk, he feels
as if he could move Cader Idris. And when he has won Enid
he brings her to Arthur’s capital where the Queen awaits
them with impatience.

Now thrice that morning Guinevere had climb’d
The giant tower, from whose high crest, they say,

Men saw the goodly hills of Somerset,

And white sails flying on the yellow sea ;

But not to goodly hill or yellow sea
Look’d the fair Queen, but up the vale of Usk,

By the flat meadow, till she saw them come.

In Geraint and Enid the Usk is again mentioned, when Enid
warns Geraint of three villains lying in ambush.

1 Bread. 2 No English.

TENNYSON AND WALES

In scarce longer time
Than at Caeideon the full-tided Usk,

Before he turn to fall seaward again,

Pauses, did Enid, keeping watch, behold

Three other horsemen.

Recollections of North Wales also emerge in Geraint and
Enid. Once, as Tennyson stood near Festiniog listening to
the brawling of a mountain-torrent, he heard the louder roar
of a large waterfall and he uses this experience as a simile to
convey the effect of Geraint’s massive voice heard above the
din of battle.

As one,

That listens near a torrent mountain-brook,

All thro’ the crash of the near cataract hears
The drumming thunder of the huger fall
At distance, were the soldiers wont to hear
His voice in battle.

At the close of the poem occurs yet another simile, which
embodies a personal observation of Tennyson. Geraint, now
reconciled to Enid, lies recovering of his grievous wound, and
her gentle presence

Fill’d all the genial courses of his blood
With deeper and with ever deeper love,

As the south-west that blowing Bala lake
Fills all the sacred Dee.

2. His Knoiuledge of Welsh Literature and Tradition

These reminiscences of Tennyson’s Welsh tours are by no
means the only link which connects him with Wales. He
knew something of Welsh history, literature, and tradition.
As his son records in the Memoir, before 1840 Tennyson
could not decide whether to cast the Arthurian legends into
the form of an epic or into that of a musical masque, but
having settled on the epic form he abandoned himself to
serious study of his theme. ‘ He thought, read, and talked
about King Arthur.’ Keeping his goal in view, Tennyson

TENNYSON AND WALES

set himself, during his stay in Wales in 1856, to acquire some
knowledge of Welsh with the help of local schoolmasters, and
he and his wife read together the Hanes Cymru of Thomas
Price, the poems of Llywarch Hen, and the Mabinogion.

One of the best known tales in the Mabinogion is that of
‘ Math the Son of Mathonwy in the course of which it is
narrated how Math and Gwydion by magic wrought a maiden
from the blossoms of the oak, the broom, and the meadow¬
sweet. She was the fairest and most graceful being that
man ever saw and they named her Blodeuwedd. In The
Marriage of Geraint the mother of Enid, arraying her in
a rich silken robe, compares her to this maiden of wondrous
beauty. However, the only tale in the Mabinogion which
Tennyson treated fully was that of ‘ Geraint the Son of
Erbin

A comparison of Tennyson’s version writh the original is
illuminating in various ways. One notices immediately
a number of changes in the narrative, the object of which
was to secure greater unity. In the tale, Limours figures
only in the second part, after the marriage of Geraint and
Enid. Tennyson makes him a suitor, who had pestered Enid
with his attentions long before she had met Geraint. Simi¬
larly, Edyrn, instead of vanishing early on, as in the tale, is
reintroduced at the close. In order to weld together both
parts of his story, Tennyson also makes the dress of Enid an
important feature, so much so that at times, especially
towards the end of The Marriage of Geraint, the space given
to it seems disproportionate. The Queen is made to say that,
even if Geraint’s bride were a beggar, she would clothe her
like the sun ; hence Geraint brings Enid to court in her faded
silk, and this it is which holds a higher place in her affection
than the gorgeous robe that Doorm the tempter offers her.
Tennyson is equally careful to relate his story to the central
theme of the Idylls of the King, which gives it a purpose all
its own. On the morning of the hunt Guinevere is pictured
as lying in bed lost in sweet dreams of Lancelot, and it is the
fear lest her example should taint Enid which makes Geraint
withdraw his wife from the court. At the close Tennyson

2339-14

TENNYSON AND WALES

brings before us the ideal king, and it is while fighting for
Arthur that Geraint perishes.

The firm constructive hand of Tennyson is again seen in
the omission of mafty details in the medieval tale which
appeared to him discursive and irrelevant. He never forgot
that he wished to concentrate on Geraint and Enid, and that
everything else must be subordinated to the narrative of their
relations. The tale opens by saying that Arthur had held
court at Caerleon for seven Easters and five Christmases, but
that on this occasion it was Whitsuntide. Then it explains
that Caerleon was chosen because it was so easy of access by
sea and land. Tennyson briefly mentions that Arthur held
court at Caerleon at Whitsuntide. Next the tale speaks of
the nine tributary kings, the earls and barons who were
Arthur’s guests, of the thirteen churches set apart for mass
and of how they were allotted — one for Ai’thur and his
guests, one for the Queen and her ladies, one for the Steward
of the Household and the suitors, a fourth for the Franks
and other officers, and the remaining nine for the Masters of
the Household, of whom the most famous was Gwalchmai
because of his noble birth and prowess in war. We then
hear who was Arthur’s chief porter, how he carried out his
office and how he had seven men under him whose task it
was, except at one of the high festivals, to guard Arthur.
Thereupon follow their names, lineage, and personal peculiari¬
ties, while in the meantime the story is delayed. Tennyson
expedites it by leaving out all these particulars.

Characteristic of the old Welsh narrator is not only his
love of genealogy but also his passion for festivities, and so
he proceeds to relate how Arthur and his court spent the
night before the hunt in song and entertainments. He then
tells how they went to bed, how Arthur on awaking called
his four attendants, whose names and lineage are of course
given, and how they arrayed Arthur. We learn further that
the King noticed Guinevere so fast asleep that she did not
move in her bed, and that he told the attendants not to awake
her ; then that he heard the horns sounding, one from near
the lodging of the chief huntsman and the other from near

TENNYSON AND WALES 88

that of the chief page. All this Tennyson dismisses in two
lines :

So with the morning all the court were gone.

But Guinevere lay late into the morn.

The contrast between the poem and the tale may again be
illustrated from the scene where Geraint and Enid are enter¬
tained at court. The tale mentions the minstrelsy, the ample
supply of liquor, the multitude of games, and the bountiful
gifts bestowed upon Enid, including the stag’s head which
increased her fame and added to the number of her friends.
To Tennyson all this was as nothing, and he merely says of
Enid that the Queen

clothed her for her bridals like the sun ;

And all that week was old Caerleon gay.

Another portion of the tale which Tennyson modified was
that concerning the departure of Geraint and Enid from
Arthur’s court after their marriage. The tale describes how
ambassadors came from Erbin of Cornwall, who asked that
his son should be allowed to return, as he himself was grow¬
ing old and his neighbours began to cast covetous eyes on
his possessions, so that Geraint would be better occupied in
defending these territories than in winning profitless tourna¬
ments. It proceeds to relate how the ambassadors refreshed
themselves alter their journey and how Arthur upon reflec¬
tion found it but right that Geraint should go. We hear
likewise of the conversation between Gei'aint and Arthur and
the Queen ; of those who accompanied Geraint ; of the dis¬
cussions about the desirability of Edyrn forming one of their
number; of the company awaiting Geraint on the other side
of the Severn ; of the welcome given to him in his own land ;
of the rejoicing at Erbin’s court, the minstrelsy, games, and
feasting ; of how Erbin handed over the power to Geraint in
spite of his reluctance ; of how the vassals pledged them¬
selves to Geraint ; of the gifts which were exchanged, and of
Geraint’s progress through Cornwall to receive homage ; and
finally of how he escorted the nobles, who had come with him
from Arthur’s court, on their homeward journey and after-

84 TENNYSON AND WALES

wards inspected even the uttermost pai'ts of his dominions.
In Tennyson, on the other hand, nothing is said of the aged
Erbin’s pathetic appeal ; the reason for Geraint s departure
is that he fears the effect upon Enid of the Queen s example
and hence gives as a pretext to the King the fact that his
princedom, bordering on lands infested with bandits, needs
his protecting arm. All the other details are compressed
into four lines :

And the King
Mused for a little on his plea, but, last,
Allowing it, the prince and Enid rode,

And fifty knights rode with them, to the shores
Of Severn, and they past to their own land.

Previously there is in the tale an awkward passage which
Tennyson was too much of an artist to leave unaltered.
After the encounter with the Knight of the Sparrow-Hawk
the story of Geraint and Enid is dropped for some time, and
the tale reverts to Arthur’s hunting ol the stag, and intro¬
duces an argument as to who shall be presented with its
head. This being settled, it goes on to describe in detail the
sorry appearance of Edyrn when he came to Arthur s court,
the conversation with the King and Queen, the treatment
accorded to Edyrn and his lady, and the healing of his
wounds by Morgan Tud, the royal physician. Only after
this lengthy digression is the story of Geraint and Enid
resumed, Tenayson avoids this jerky conduct of the narra¬
tive. He ignores the hunt and dismisses Edyrn briefly,
returning to him at the close of the poem, when the lovers
tale is ended,

Tennyson saw clearly that many points which a medieval
writer would be disposed to comment on were not merely un¬
essential to the main theme but even a hindrance to it.
What more natural, when Geraint sets out with Enid, than
that the tale should explain what steps were taken to carry
on the administration in his absence ? But Tennyson passes
over it in silence. Again, the medieval reader would delight
in the description of the horses of the dwarf, the knight and
the lady, and of the armour or raiment they wore. Here

TENNYSON AND WALES

also Tennyson says nothing. Not less significant is his
treatment of the combats in which the tale abounds. The old
writer revelled in fighting, so much so that the frequent
triumphs of the hero become extravagant, and we find our¬
selves no longer in the world of reality but in the realm of
marvels. Tennyson begins the encounter of Geraint with the
Knight of the Sparrow-Hawk by shortening the account
of the tournament ; it is not allowed to obscure the central
motive. In the description of Geraint’s quest the tale makes
him defeat three different bands of robbers. Their numbers,
whether three, four, or five, are immaterial. Like so many
puppets they come forward and are mechanically dispatched
by Geraint. Tennyson omits one of these combats, reduces
the number of assailants in the others, and by the manner of
his description renders his stoxy more convincing. In the first
combat Geraint kills his first enemy with his lance, and then,
darting out his sword to right and left, puts the others out of
action ; in the second the leader is pictured as one of enormous
stature, and as soon as he is overthrown his companions flee
in panic.1 In the tale the combat which follows the flight of
Geraint and Enid from the town is ludicrous. Eighty knights
in succession attack Geraint and with mechanical precision
each is overcome with one blow. The Earl comes next and
holds out a little longer, but only to be defeated in his turn.
Tennyson is infinitely more vivid, dramatic, and credible
when he tells how

Wild Limours,

Borne on a black horse, like a thunder-cloud
Whose skirts are loosen'd by the breaking storm,

Half ridden oft’ with by the thing he rode.

And all in passion uttering a dry shriek.

Dash’d on Geraint.

Limours is overthrown, then the man behind him, whereupon
the rest, seized with terror at the approach of Geraint, turn
their horses in flight.

The poem omits altogether several encounters, such as that

’ Variety is also obtained by the changing attitude of Enid who in the
first combat looks on, hut in the second anxiously stands aside with

86 TENNYSON AND WALES

with Gwiffert Petit, who will let no one pass his tower with¬
out a duel, those with Kai and Gwalchmai, when Geraint
refuses to accompany them to Arthur, and that with the
giants. Tennyson would have nothing to do with adventure
for its own sake, and he felt that all these struggles by their
very number became incredible and also impeded the march
of the main story. Although his hero’s qualities are heightened,
Tennyson did not wish him to be a mere fairy-tale figure.
For this reason, and also because the tale of the reconciliation
of Geraint and Enid was complete, he omitted as superfluous
the adventure of the magic mist.

In harmony with Tennyson’s desire to avoid mere marvels
is his treatment of character. With him characterization
and the analysis of motive take a prominent place ; in the
tale they are fragmentary or non-existent. In no respect are
the medieval tale and the nineteenth-century poem more
unlike than in the love of incident on the one hand and the
interest in psychology on the other. Characters such as the
dwarf and Edyrn his master, Limours, Doorm, Enid’s mother
and Yniol assume much clearer shape under Tennyson’s
hand. In the tale no explanation is given of the dwarf’s
churlish conduct to the Queen’s attendant. Tennyson pictures
him as old, vicious, irritable, and proud like his haughty
master, so that at once we understand his action. At a later
stage, when Edyrn has ‘ weeded his heart ’ and is about to be
admitted to the Round Table, he is made to recount to Enid
the causes of his former arrogance.

To the character of Limours Tennyson devotes far more
attention than the corresponding figure receives in the tale.
In the latter he is shown in a more favourable light. Thus,
when he is informed of the arrival of Geraint and Enid in his
town, he gives instructions that they shall be honourably
used, sends a youth to wait upon them, and himself pays
a visit of courtesy. He has no evil intent, and it is only on
seeing the beauty of Enid that he tries to induce her under
threats of violence to abandon Geraint. Tennyson, who intro-

averted gaze, just as she warns Geraint sometimes by speech, sometimes
by pointing silently to the dust raised by the hoofs of his foes.

TENNYSON AND WALES 87

duces Limours as a suitor for Enid in the earlier portion of
the story, has already sketched the man :

A creature wholly given to brawls and wine,

Drunk even when he woo’d.

We are therefore prepared for Limours when he and his
followers burst into the room of Geraint and Enid. Effe¬
minate in appearance and pale from dissipation, he addresses
Geraint face to face with a courtly air, but amidst this dis¬
play of cordiality watches out of the corner of his eye the
sad and lonely Enid. Geraint offers refreshment and Limours,
Hushed with wine, tells tales of double meaning and his wit
having made Geraint merry, he asks leave to speak to her.
He then declares his love in a sentimental vein. She is the
pilot star of his solitary life, his early and his only love. It
is the loss of her which has made him wild, and yet he is not
wholly riotous. He insinuates that Geraint has wearied of
her; she need but say the word and he shall be removed. If
she will not, Limours threatens to take advantage of his
superior power, but the next moment apologizes for his mad¬
ness. Then

Low at leave-taking, with his brandish’d plume
Brushing his instep, bow’d the all-amorous earl.

Tennyson has no wish that our sympathy should be won
by the maudlin self-pity of Limours. He shows him on his
way home with 1 wine-heated eyes ’, babbling to his followers
of Enid’s love for him.

Another full-length portrait is that of Earl Doorm. In the
tale the Earl is courteous to Enid at first and only when his
desires are thwarted does he use force. His arguments, when
he seeks to induce her to forget Geraint, are almost kindly :

‘ I will act towards thee in such wise, that thou needest not
be sorrowful, whether yonder knight live or die. Behold,
a good Earldom, together with myself, will I bestow on thee ;
be therefore happy and joyful.’ It is not until Enid has irri¬
tated him by her stubborn refusal that he loses his temper
and boxes her ears. In Tennyson, on the other hand, the
wild, licentious character of the Earl is suggested from the

TENNYSON AND WALES

beginning. As Enid sat by the wounded Geraint no one
heeded her :

A woman weeping for her murder’d mate
Was cared as much for as a summer shower.

One took him for a victim of the Earl and found it too
perilous to stop and pity him. Then came one of Doorm’s
men half-whistling, half-singing a coarse song and drove the
dust in Enid’s eyes. Another traveller, a fugitive

flying from the wrath of Doorm
Before an ever-fancied arrow, made
The long way smoke beneath him in his fear.

We are thus ready for the entry of the gigantic Doorm.
Tennyson presents him to us :

Broad-faced with under-fringe of russet beard,

Bound on a foray, rolling eyes of prey.

With loud voice, like one hailing a ship, he rudely accosts
Enid. If Geraint is not dead, why need she wail? If he is,
then she is a fool — wailing will not bring him back to life,
and her tears mar her beauty. He speaks as one to whom
the higher emotions are entirely unknown and to whom death
is an everyday sight. His predatory instinct is revealed in
his command to look after Geraint’s steed, his sensual nature
in the lustful eye which he at once casts on Enid. But he
is not one to let his plans be altered for the sake of a
woman, and so, unlike the knight in the tale, he does not
chivalrously escort Enid to his castle but proceeds on his
foray. Geraint and Enid are entrusted to two brawny spear¬
men, as brutal and callous as their master. Angered at the
thought of losing their share of the boot}^, on reaching the
castle they throw down in haste the bier on which the wounded
Geraint is lying and rush out, cursing him and Enid, their
master, and their own souls.

It is noteworthy how Tennyson repeatedly emphasizes the
nakedness of the hall. There is no sign of refinement, all is
hard and uncouth like the Earl himself. The scene in the
hall that follows the return of Doorm and his men strengthens

TENNYSON AND WALES

the impression already received. They hurl down their spears
with a clatter ; Doorm hammers on the table with the haft
of his knife, while hogs and quarters of beeves are brought
in and the hall is dim with steam. No word is spoken as
they sit down and eat noisily, ‘ feeding like horses The
gentle Enid shrinks from these bestial creatures, but Doorm,
catching sight of her, urges her to eat, and in the presence of
the crowd brazenly declares that were she not so pale, she
might share his earldom. At this :

The brawny spearman let his cheek
Bulge with the unswallow’d piece, and turning stared,

while the women with venomous tongue hiss in hate and
jealousy. With low voice and drooping head, Enid merely
asks to be left alone. Doorm, satisfied with his own gracious¬
ness, assumes that she has thanked him and urges her to eat
and be glad. When she asks how she can be glad, the Earl
in his fury carries her by main force to the table and thrusts
the dish before her. This emphasis on Doorm’s brutality
springs from Tennyson’s conception ; the prototj'pe in the
tale ‘ many times desired her to eat ’. To the poet we owe
also the vivid picture of the Earl striding up and down the
hall, gnawing now his upper, now his lower lip or his russet
beard. It is characteristic of his mentality that he should
think to win Enid by the gift of a beautiful robe. How can
an earthy creature like this understand the pathetic appeal :

Pray you be gentle, pray you let me be.

I never loved, can never love but him.

Yea, God, I pray you of your gentleness,

He being as he is, to let me be.

Fidelity of this kind is beyond Doorm’s ken and he answers
with the argument most familiar to him — a blow. Such is
Doorm, a vivid figure who seems to have stepped out of the
reign of King Stephen, when men said in bitter despair that
Christ and his saints slept, and this figure is entirely Tenny¬
son’s creation. The very antithesis of the Tennysonian ideal
of reverence, wisdom, temperance, and self-control, Doorm is
unforgettable.

TENNYSON AND WALES

The characters of Enid’s father and mother are not drawn
in such detail and yet they are less shadowy than in the tale.
The mother’s affection for and pride in her daughter and her
weakness for dress are shown. Hence her silent indignation
when Geraint insists on taking Enid to Arthur’s court in a
worn and faded gown. Even in adversity she cannot forget
that she comes from

a goodly house,

With store of rich apparel, sumptuous fare,

And page, and maid, and squire, and seneschal,

And pastime both of hawk and hound, and all
That appertains to noble maintenance.

Still more interesting than Tennyson’s portrayal of the
mother is his analysis of the father. Just as he underlines
the baseness of Limours and Doorm, so he idealizes Yniol.
In the tale Yniol is far from immaculate and indeed richly
deserves the misfortune that comes upon him. His crime was
that he seized the possessions of his nephew, with the result,
as Yniol informs Geraint, that 1 when he came to his strength,
he demanded of me his property, but I withheld it from him.
So he made war upon me, and wrested from me all that
I possessed.’ We are inclined to hold with the nephew and
see no reason why the gallant and chivalrous Geraint of
Tennyson’s conception should intervene on behalf of this
Yniol. Tennyson perceived the difficulty and fearing also
that an unsympathetic Yniol might weaken the attraction of
Enid, he completely altered the motives. The fault lies in
the tempestuous character of the nephew, knowing which,
Yniol rejects his suit for the hand of Enid. In revenge the
nephew ousts him from his earldom and sacks the castle.
This is all the more easily done, because, owing to his lavish
hospitality, Yniol is reduced in means, and his servants are
readily won over by large bribes. Our sympathy is thus
transferred to Yniol, who is a pleasing, if somewhat weak
personality. He lacks will-power and is so gentle that he lets
men have their way. In his adversity he displays a similar
passivity and meekly endures the wrongs inflicted on him,
even at the risk of incurring contempt. The same paternal

TENNYSON AND WALES

care as led him to thwart his nephew is manifest when Geraint
requests that Enid may be the lady whom he will uphold in
the tournament. Yniol wishes that his wife shall first consult
Enid’s inclination, for

a maiden is a tender thing

And best by her that bore her understood.

What could be more natural and desirable than that an Yniol
such as this should receive the help of Geraint ?

It is above all upon the characters of Geraint and Enid
and their interaction that Tennyson has bestowed his skill
and artistry. Tennyson’s Geraint is the flower of chivalry, and
the problem which the poet has to solve is how to account for
the hero’s unkindness to Enid without destroying our belief
in his noble qualities. In what measure and by what means
he achieves this will be seen later. As for Enid, she is a very
different personage from her counterpart in the Mabinogion.
The latter embodies the medieval ideal of woman, unques¬
tioning obedience to husband and parents, by whom she is
treated accordingly. Tennyson’s Enid, on the other hand, is
no insignificant figure, and throughout the poem appears in
the foreground more often than in the tale. We have an
example in the first meeting of Geraint and Enid. The
medieval narrator, describing Geraint’s arrival at the hall of
Yniol, says that he beheld ‘ a maiden, upon whom were a
vest and a veil, that were old, and beginning to be worn out.
And, truly, he never saw a maiden more full of comeliness,
and grace, and beauty than she.’ Conscious that this is one
of the vital situations of his story, Tennyson gives it a
greater amplitude and richness. As Geraint approaches, he
hears Enid singing, and the description that ensues transcends
the mundane and carries us away to the world of romance.
Love as instantaneous and imperishable as that of Tristan
for Isolt has come to Geraint :

Here, by God’s rood, is the one maid for me.

Subsequently in the tale Enid waits upon Geraint, even
disarrays him, and gives his horse provender, all which
Geraint seems to take for granted. In the poem Geraint’s

TENNYSON AND WALES

chivalry prompts him to rise and help Enid in her task, and
only reluctantly does he acquiesce when Yniol informs him
that the custom of the house will not permit of a guest
serving himself. Thus, owing to Tennyson’s skilful presenta¬
tion, in spite of Geraint’s remissness, his reputation for
courtesy is enhanced. Immediately after, the tale relates
that Enid, having bought provisions in the town, apologizes
for their inadequacy, and that Geraint answers curtly, ‘ It is
good enough’, an incident which Tennyson suppresses. Equally
characteristic is the passage in the tale where Gei’aint asks
leave to use the name of Enid in challenging the Knight of
the Sparrow-Hawk. Her father answers, 1 Gladly will I per¬
mit thee ’. An echo of an age when a daughter’s obedience
was a matter of course. But Tennyson’s Geraint in requesting
this favour declares his admiration for Enid ; it is not merely
that for the purpose of the tournament he needs some lady
to uphold. And Yniol ’s answer is that her own inclinations
must first be discovered. After the tournament Yniol in the
tale gives Enid away as he would one of his serfs or his
goods and chattels, and Geraint is as curt and masterful as
he. ‘ “ Chieftain, behold the maiden for whom thou didst
challenge at the tournament, I bestow her upon thee.” “ She
shall go with me ”, said Geraint, “ to the Court of Arthur; and
Arthur and Gwenhwyvar they shall dispose of her as they
will. Let not the damsel array herself except in her vest and
veil, until she come to the Court of Arthur, to be clad by
Gwenhwyvar in such garments as she may choose.’’ ’ The
corresponding scene in Tennyson forms an illuminating con¬
trast. Representing as it does another great crisis in Enid’s
life, it is dealt with fully, and her emotions are set forth in
detail. The question of her attire is not so easy of solution
as in the tale ; we are no longer in the age of patient Griselda.
Geraint says to her father :

Earl, entreat her by my love,

Albeit I give no reason but my wish,

That she ride with me in her faded silk.

Even after this Geraint feels called upon to make elaborate
apologies and explanations to Enid’s mother. This prominence

TENNYSON AND WALES 93

of the women, the kindly consideration of Yniol and the
deference of Geraint are altogether foreign to the tale. Again
we seem to step back several centuries when, in the tale, after
the first combat, Geraint once more enjoins silence upon Enid.
1 “ I declare unto Heaven,” said he, “ if thou doest not thus, it
will be to thy cost.” “ I will do, as far as I can, Lord ”, said
she, “ according to thy desire.” ’ Of these threats and this
slave-like obedience there is no trace in Tennyson. His Enid
observes Geraint’s commands, it is true, but not because she
is cowed by a bully.

Not only has Tennyson modernized the relations of Geraint
and Enid, he has made their actions more reasonable. The
development of their love is traced step by step in a manner
which the tale does not even attempt. Geraint, charmed by
the singing of Enid, is completely won by her gentle demeanour
and involuntarily his eyes follow her as she moves about the
hall. As for Enid, she has often heard from her father of
Geraint’s exploits :

This dear child hath often heard me praise
Your feats of arms, and often when I paused
Hath ask’d again, and ever loved to hear.

What more probable than that Enid, whose only suitors
hitherto had been the drunken Limours and the arrogant
Edyrn, should fall in love with the paragon of chivalry,
Geraint ?

Obviously Geraint and Enid move in a different atmosphere
from their counterparts in the tale. They are idealized figures
of romance and embody the Tennysonian ethical code. The
process of idealization may be illustrated from the incident of
the dwarf. In the original Geraint is on the point of slaying
the dwarf, but refrains because his vengeance would still
remain unsatisfied and also because the knig-ht would irnme-
diately kill him in his defenceless state. All ignoble or even
practical calculations are far from Tennyson’s hero. He
controls himself, such is

his exceeding manfulness
And pure nobility of temperament,

Wroth to be wroth at such a worm.

TENNYSON AND WALES

It is the lofty nobility of Geraint’s nature which causes the
misunderstanding between him and Enid. He is always
haunted by the fear that her intimacy with Guinevere, an
intimacy which he himself had originally desired and en¬
couraged, will contaminate her, and Tennyson gives him
confirmation of his doubts in certain words uttered by Enid,
which he overhears and misinterprets. Enid is musing and
reproaches herself for not telling Geraint that men slander
him by saying that he has become effeminate and neglects
his duties as a ruler. ‘ 0 me, I fear that I am no true wife ! ’
she says, and Geraint, waking at this moment, snatches at
the words. Tennyson therefore makes Geraint’s conduct
more reasonable and in some measure justifiable. He is,
moreover, careful to point out that even so, Geraint would
not believe the worst of Enid :

He loved and reverenced her too much
To dream she could be guilty of foul act.

How significant it is also that when he orders Enid to follow
him, he brings no open accusation against her. ‘ I charge
thee, ask not ’, a delicacy unknown to his prototype, who
tells Enid that, when his strength is gone, she can seek out
him of whom she is thinking.

Thus Tennyson’s Geraint sets out with conflicting emotions,
and the poet has attempted to show the shifting phases of
the struggle until the reconciliation is ultimately reached,
a gradual and subtle process of which the tale gives but the
slightest indications. He tells us Geraint’s motive for sending
Enid to ride ahead :

Perhaps because he loved her passionately,

And felt that tempest brooding round his heart,

Which, if he spoke at all, would break perforce
Upon a head so dear in thunder.

Even in this crisis Geraint’s tenderness checks his an^er.
After the first encounter he draws a little nearer to her, and
regret begins to moderate his rage. With mingled feelings
he watches her trying to manage the steeds of the dead
knights. He would like to give vent to his wrath in one

TENNYSON AND WALES 95

wild outburst, but cannot bring himself to charge her with
the least immodesty, and so it smoulders fiercely.

Thus tongue-tied, it made him wroth the more
That she could speak whom his own ear had heard
Call herself false : and suffering thus he made
Minutes an age.

Just before the second combat he cannot refrain from dropping
a hint of his suspicion : ‘ If I fall, cleave to the better man’,
but after it is over he draws still closer to her.1 In the
episode of the mowers’ dinner his latent affection is revealed.
Ihe tale makes the boy offer it of his own accord, but in
Tennj^son it is Geraint, who, observing the pallor of Enid and
feeling distress at her fainting condition, begs the youth to
let her eat. His first thought is of her in spite of his own
gnawing hunger, which Tennyson is careful to emphasize.

Meanwhile we have not been left in ignorance of Enid’s
emotions. Stupefied at first, and wondering what her fault
can be, she prays for Geraint’s safety, starting at the whistle
of the plover and trembling at the thought of an ambush.
Though she respects bis wishes, when danger threatens, Avitli
‘ timid firmness ’ she disregards them and speaks. During the
combats she suffers agonies of fear on Geraint’s account. In
the second she stands aside, not daring to watch,

only breathe

Short fits of prayer, at every stroke a breath.

At times she falls into reverie, thinking of the past and in
spite of Geraint's inexplicable behaviour, her love is unabated.
In their room at night she bends tenderly over him, listening
to his low and equal breathing and rejoicing that he is so far
unscathed. Tennyson stresses her devotion by his description
of her exhaustion and care-filled sleep :

1 In the tale only after the third combat with robbers, omitted by
Tennyson, is Geraint made to feel remorse. ‘ It grieved him as much as
his wrath would permit, to see a maiden so illustrious as she having so
much trouble with the care of the horses.’ Still it does not prevent him
from making her sit up all night to watch the horses while he sleeps.

TENNYSON AND WALES

OvertoilM

By that clay’s grief and travel, evermore
Seem’d catching at a rootless thorn, and then
Went slipping down horrible precipices,

And strongly striking out her limbs awoke.

Her P'entle manner and low, harmonious voice recall Cordelia
in the concluding scenes of King Lear. Ever vigilant, she
glides about at night ‘ among the heavy breathings of the
house ’ like a ‘ household spirit

When the journey is resumed, though Geraint is sullen and
suspicious, he does not repel Enid and rides much nearer to
her than the day before. A new hope springs up in her
heart, but the reconciliation is not yet.

Geraint

Waving an angry hand as who should say
‘ Ye watch me’, sadden’d all her heart again.

And after the defeat of Limours he cruelly asks if they
should strip her lover and if her palfrey would have the
heart to bear the dead man’s armour. Here for the first
time Geraint resembles his medieval prototype.

However, the climax in the I’elations of Geraint and Enid
is fast approaching. When Geraint is wounded by Limours
and suddenly reels from his saddle, Enid shows her strength
of mind. Without faltering she undoes his armour and binds
up his wound, and only then does she burst into tears. When
they are taken to the hall of Doorm, Enid sits by Geraint
chafing his pale hands, calling to him, her warm tears falling
on his face. Slowly he revives, but feigns death to test her
to the uttermost and enjoy the knowledge that it is for him
she weeps. It was perhaps partly for the sake of this scene
that Tennyson, altering the tale, sent Doorm on a foray. The
fact that the reader knows Geraint to be awake and listening,
when Doorm afterwards bullies Enid, lends to the poem
a dramatic tension lacking in the tale. After the sudden
death of Doorm, Geraint makes an ample apology to Enid.
He has done her wrong, but henceforth is hers ; as a penance
he will not ask what she meant by saying that she was no

TENNYSON AND WALES 97

true wife, but will die rather than doubt. And so the chivalrous
nature which Tennyson set out to depict, after being obscured
for a while, shines forth once more. Enid is too deeply
moved for words, but her feelings are described at the supreme
moment of reconciliation :

And never yet, since high in Paradise
O’er the four rivers the first roses blew,

Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind

Than lived thro’ her, who in that perilous hour

Put hand to hand beneath her husband’s heart,

And felt him hers again. She did not weep,

But o’er her meek eyes came a happy mist
Like that which kept the heart of Eden green
Before the useful trouble of the rain.

Just as Tennyson is far more concerned with the psychology
of his characters than is the tale, so he bestows more pains
upon vivid description. The sketches of the town and the
ruined castle in The Marriage of Geraint owe nothing to the
tale. At every turn, whether it be the description of the din
made by the armourers or of some combat, one observes
picturesque details which Tennyson has added and which
invest the story with a new quality. Thus Geraint and Enid

climb’d upon a fair and even ridge
And show’d themselves against the sky, and sank.

Geraint reaches the town, ‘ down the long street riding
wearily ’, and afterwards ‘ o’er a mount of newly- fallen stones ’
he enters ‘the dusky-rafter’d many-cobweb’d hall ’ of Yniol.
And when Geraint and Enid set forth from their palace, they
pass ‘ gray swamps and pools, waste places of the hern ’. A
few passages from the tale and the poem, if we put them side
by side, will show how much more vivid Tennyson can be.

The tale:

They saw four armed horsemen come forth from the forest.

The poem :

Enid was aware of three tall knights
On horseback, wholly arm’d, behind a rock
In shadow, waiting for them.

2339-14

TENNYSON AND WALES

The tale :

A group of thickly tangled copse-wood.

The poem :

In the first shallow shade of a deep wood,

Before a gloom of stubborn-shafted oaks.

The tale :

They came to an open country, with meadows on one hand,
and mowers mowing the meadows.

The poem :

Issuing under open heavens beheld
A little town with towers, upon a rock,

And close beneath, a meadow gemlike chased
In the brown wild, and mowers mowing in it.

Such little pictures, which seem to come straight from some
old illuminated manuscript, Tennyson delighted in, and often,
as here, they are elaborated from a mere hint in the original.
Not less frequently they spring entirely from his own imagina¬
tion, as when we read how Geraint

remark’d

The lusty mowers labouring dinnerless,

And watch’d the sun blaze on the turning scythe,

And after nodded sleepily in the heat.

Tennyson further enhances the poetic quality of his narra¬
tive by numerous similes which lend a splendour unknown
to the workaday prose of the tale. Most of them are derived
from Tennyson’s close observation of Nature, and the reader
is continually struck by their appropriateness. Geraint in
his anger ‘ smiles like a stormy sunlight ’ ; he glances at Enid
‘ as careful robins eye the delver’s toil ’ ; in his festive array
he rides ‘glancing like a dragon-fly ’ ; the muscles on his arm
slope ‘ as slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone, running too
vehemently to break upon it ’ ; his hard message to Enid falls
‘ like flaws in summer laying lusty corn ’ ; and Enid struck by
Doorm’s unknightly hand, utters ‘ a sharp and bitter cry, As
of a wild thing taken in the trap, Which sees the trapper
coming thro’ the wood’. Edyrn on his first arrival at the

TENNYSON AND WALES 99

court of Arthur is ‘ as sullen as a beast new-caged the lance
of Geraints foe splinters ‘ like an icicle’, and the armourers
at work make a noise

As of a broad brook o’er a shingly bed
Brawling, or like a clamour of the rooks
At distance, ere they settle for the night.

Very effective is the simile which compares the panic-
stricken flight of Geraint’s enemies to that of a shoal of fish,
darting among the shallows, as soon as a hand is raised
against the sun. Equally striking is the way in which the
overthrow of another opponent is narrated :

As he that tells the tale
Saw once a great piece of a promontory
That had a sapling growing on it, slide
From the long shore-cliff’s windy walls to the beach,

And there lie still, and yet the sapling grew ;

So lay the man transfixt.

Two other similes, still more elaborate, may be mentioned,
on which Tennyson has lavished all his wealth of melody and
magic suggestion. The first describes the dress which Doorm
offers Enid :

A splendid silk of foreign loom,

Where like a shoaling sea the lovely blue
Play’d into green, and thicker down the front
With jewels than the sward with drops of dew,

When all night long a cloud clings to the hill,

And with the dawn ascending lets the day
Strike where it clung ; so thickly shone the gems.

The other occurs in the account of how Geraint, approaching
the ruined hall of Yniol, hears the song of the invisible Enid :

As the sweet voice of a bird,

Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,

Moves him to think what kind of bird it is
That sings so delicately clear, and make
Conjecture of the plumage and the form ;

So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint ;

And made him like a man abroad at morn
When first the liquid note beloved of men

G 2

100

TENNYSON AND WALES

Comes flying over many a windy wave

To Britain, and in April suddenly

Breaks from a coppice gemm’d with green and red,

And he suspends his converse with a friend,

Or it may be the labour of his hands,

To think or say ‘ There is the nightingale

In many respects Tennyson’s poem is undoubtedly superior
to the tale in the Mabinogion. He has knitted the story more
closely together, and by the omission of irrelevant details,
particularly about ceremonies and genealogies, he has made
the structure of the poem clearer. With this greater lucidity
of outline there goes a more even flow of the narrative.
Tennyson’s Enid is also distinctive in that it is a study of
character rather than a tale of adventure ; the personages are
more like human beings and less like the erratic, unaccount¬
able creations of a fairy-tale. The poem likewise displays
more skill than the original by revealing character, not only
directly, but also through environment, material and human.
Moreover, Tennyson’s characters have an ethical value, a
wider significance than those of the tale, and (the poem is
altogether more varied, vivid, dramatic, and radiant with
poetic beauty. Aud yet the transformation is not all gain.
There is an artless, unsophisticated charm about the tale,
which of necessity evaporates in the more subtle and resplen¬
dent world of Tennyson. Nor does the tale know anything
of the sentimentality to which at times Tennyson draws
dangerously near. However, the feeling which predominates
after a comparison of Enid with the Welsh original is that
of admiration for so consummate an artist.

Though Tennyson’s familiarity with the Mabinogion was
of incomparably greater importance to him than his know¬
ledge of other Welsh literatui'e, one cannot fail to note his
obligations to Llywarch Hen and the Triads. It was the
reading of Llywarch’s famous lament over the fallen Geraint
that determined the way in which Tennyson ended his
Enid. The tale in the Mabinogion closes with a picture of
Geraint’s prosperous reign, during which his ‘ warlike fame
and splendour lasted with renown and honour But Tenny-

TENNYSON AND WALES 101

son, bearing in mind Llywarch’s elegy upon Geraint after the
great struggle at Llongborth, describes how he

fell

Against the heathen of the Northern Sea
In battle.

As for the Triads, there are signs in various poems that
Tennyson knew something of these singular and characteristic
productions of Welsh literature. One of them is to be found
in The Marriage of Geraint, where Enid’s mother, admiring
the beauty of her daughter, declares her

Sweeter than the bride of Cassivelaun,

Flur, for whose love the Roman Caesar first
Invaded Britain,

and she proceeds to contrast the repulse of the invading
Caesar with the feeling of welcome that she entertains
towards the new conqueror, Geraint, who is to carry off Enid.
In this passage Tennyson diverges from the genuine Welsh
tradition, which tells that the beautiful Flur was taken
captive by Mwrchan, a Gaulish prince in alliance with Caesar,
to whom he intended to present his prize. In his anger
Caswallawn, as Cassivelaun was called in Welsh, led an army
of sixty-one thousand men against Julius Caesar, which did
not return with its leader, and hence was known as one of the
three emigrant hosts of Britain. It was possibly in order to
win a parallel to the story of Geraint and Enid that Tenny¬
son assigned to Julius Caesar and Flur a relation somewhat
different from that given in Welsh legend.1

Another reference to the Triads occurs in Gareth and
Lynette, where Merlin asks :

Know ye not then the Riddling of the Bards ;

‘ Confusion, and illusion, and relation,

Elusion, and occasion, and evasion ’ ?

By the riddling of the bards is meant the Triads , which

1 Exactly where he found this legend we do not know but conceivably
in Lady Guest’s notes to ‘ Branwen the Daughter of Llyr ’ in her ti-ansla-
tion of the Mabinogion (1849, vol. iii, pp. 139-40), where reference is
made to the Triads from which it sprang.

102

TENNYSON AND WALES

Tennyson in The Coming of Arthur calls ‘ the riddling
triplets of old time It is in this connexion that Merlin
utters three obscure stanzas, ending with the well-known line :

From the great deep to the great deep he goes.

In a note to the collected edition of Tennyson’s works we
are given an explanation of Merlin’s words. ‘The truth
appears in different guise to divers persons. The one fact is
that man comes from the great deep and returns to it’, and,
the note continues, * this is an echo of the triads of the Welsh
bards V

There is some reason for thinking that Tennyson may have
known the Triads which Southey quoted in the notes to his
Madoc.'1 2 At any rate both poets were familiar with another
tradition, current among the old Welsh bards, namely, that
every ninth wave is greater than those going before it.
Tennyson makes use of it in the magnificent passage which
relates the coming of Arthur. Bleys and Merlin his disciple,

1 The triad from which Tennyson evolved his memorable line runs
thus : ‘Animated Beings have three states of Existence, that of Inchoa-
tion in the Great Deep or Lowest Point of Existence ; that of Liberty in
the State of Humanity ; and that of Love, which is happiness in Heaven ’.
Attention is drawn to this by Professor O. L. Jiriczek ( Anglia , Beiblatt,
1926, p. 120), who also points out another triad which, although Tenny¬
son does not mention it, would surely appeal to him in his symbolical
interpretation of the Arthurian legend. It runs thus : ‘ There are three
necessary occasions of Inchoation : to collect the materials and pro¬
perties of every nature ; to collect the knowledge of every thing; and
to collect power towards subduing the Adverse and Devastative, and for
the divestation of Evil ’.

2 Professor Jiriczek suggests this and one may regard it as probable.
It is perhaps worth noting that Edward Williams, the source of Southey’s
information about the Triads , in his Poems Lyric and Pastoral (London,
1794), vol. ii, quotes that relating to the three states of existence, but
whereas he uses the word ‘ felicity ’, ‘ happiness ’ is used by Southey and
also by Rowe in the commentary which Tennyson authorized. This
might of course be a mere coincidence, but on the other hand Tennyson’s
knowledge of the tradition of the ninth wave, a tradition mentioned in
the notes to Madoc and apparently derived by Southey from the Welsh
scholars Edward Williams and William Owen Pughe, does seem to
indicate that Tennyson had profited by the reading of Madoc.

TENNYSON AND WALES

103

leaving the castle of Tintagil, where Uther has just passed
away moaning for an heir, descend through the inky darkness
towards the shore. As they gaze seawards they catch a
glimpse of a ship like a winged dragon, all bright with
shining figures :

And then the two
Dropt to the cove, and watch’d the great sea fall,

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,

Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame ;

And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet,

Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried, ‘ The King ! ’

Herbert G. Wright.

ANCRENE WISSE AND IIALI MEIBIIA D

THE Ancrene Wisse has already developed a ‘ literature
and it is very possible that nothing I can say about it will
be either new or illuminating to the industrious or leisured
that have kept up with it. I have not. But my interest in
this document is linguistic, and unless I am mistaken, a purely
linguistic aspect of the problem will bear renewed attention,
or repetition. I even believe that it may be of value to
set forth a line of argument that is based on assertions of
which the proper proof (or retractation) must wait for a later
occasion.

I start with the conviction that verj^ few Middle English
texts represent in detail the real language (in accidence,
phonology, often even in choice of spellings) of any one time
or place or person. It is not to be expected that they should,
in a period of manuscript reproduction and linguistic decentrali¬
zation ; and most of them in fact do not. Their ‘ language ’
is, in varying degrees, the product of their textual history, and
cannot be fully explained, sometimes cannot be understood at
all, by reference to geography.

If this is not universally agreed, it cannot here be fully
argued. At least it will be allowed, whether by those who
prefer to find a place on the map for each variety of ‘ textual ’
English, or those that would find subtle phonetic significance in
all the vagaries of careless texts, that there is a distinction
between a pure and consistent form of language and a con¬
fused one, and that the distinction is important, however
explained. This will still leave some force in my argument.

The mixed nonce-language produced by copying is some¬
thing different, and something to a considerable extent dis¬
tinguishable by analysis from the variations, the exceptional
forms requiring special explanation, that appear in, say, the
language of Orm or Dan Michel — where we may assume that

ANCRENE WJSSE AND IIALI M Elf) HA I) 105

we have for practical purposes a representation of two kinds
of 1 geographical ’ English. For one thing these exceptions
are mainly exceptions only to the general character of the
language and the normal lines of its descent from older forms,
not exceptions to the writer’s usage. He uses them invariably,
or in specific cases, or in circumstances capable of reasonable
explanation. In fact they are comparable to the observed
variations in the living speech of actual persons and places.

‘ Nonce-language ’ can, of course, be produced in two different
ways. By partial substitution of a dialect or spelling-system
more familiar than that of the copy ; by unsuccessful assimila¬
tion of a natural speech to a written ‘ standard ’, more or less
definite. But to distinguish these is probably not, at any
rate in early Middle English, of linguistic importance. The
result of both is an 1 accidental ’ form of language, occurring
in all its details only in one text, whose evidence thus requires
careful handling if it is to be used in the history of spoken
English. Attempted ‘ standardization ’ is not likely to concern
a student of the thirteenth century ; he is more likely to be
faced with the alteration of the unfamiliar.1

But texts such as the Ormulum or the Ayenbite of Inwit,
where all may believe in the language as genuine and more
or less ‘ geographical ’, are rare. We have not enough of them
for the separating out of the different main types that are

1 In the thirteenth century a westernizing tendency has been discerned,
I think with probability. It does not, of course, amount to the existence
of a West Midland literary standard. But many of the problems of
thirteenth-century texts (e. g. The Oiol and Nightingale) would become
more intelligible on the assumption, natural enough a priori, that the
habit of using or writing down English with any definitely literary pur¬
pose was at first preserved in the West mainly, and connected with the
lingering there of links with the past (in alliteration and all that
implies, in spelling, and in an archaic and relatively undisturbed form of
language) ; that scribes able to handle M.E. familiarly were more often
trained in the West and natively or otherwise familiar with western
English. Consideration of Ancrene Wisse, at any rate, strengthens the
impression, if my argument is sound, of the existence in the west of a
centre where English was at once more alive, and more traditional and
organized as a written form, than anywhere else.

106 ANCRENE WISSE AND HALI MEIEUAD

ingredients in cases of confusion. All the more reason for
underlining the names of those that we have.

There is an English older than Dan Michel s and richer, as
regular in spelling as Orm’s but less queer ; one that has
preserved something of its former cultivation. It is not
a language long relegated to the ‘ uplands struggling once
more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or
out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never
fallen back into ‘ lewdness and has contrived in troublous
times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentle¬
man. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and
the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living
speech— a soil somewhere in England.

This is the language first and foremost of the Coi'pus
Christi MS. of the Ancrene Wisse, the Ancrene Wisse proper.
This manuscript is of course admitted to be a good text
(the clerical errors in it are astonishingly few); and it is
well known to be in a fair hand of excellent regularity and
precision. It is even allowed to stand nearer to the original
than, say, the Cotton Nero MS. But I suggest that this is not
nearly strong enough. Whatever the textual history of the
Ancrene TEisse may be, or the merits and interest of its matter,
this text has an even more unusual claim to attention. Its
language is self-consistent and unadulterated. It is a unity.
It is either a faithful transcript of some actual dialect
of nearly unmixed descent, or a 1 standard ’ language based
on one.

But this, if true, possesses an interest for others than the
linguistic analyst. Such a fact must have a bearing on the
questions where and when, and so even on the more academic
questions by and for whom, that are put concerning the
writing of the Rule. If it is true, we may argue thus :

(i) A is written in a language (A) that is at once self-
consistent and markedly individual. It stands out among
Middle English texts, not excluding the Ayenbite or the
Ormulum, by reason of the regularity of its phonology and
its accidence. It represents, therefore, a form of English
whose development from an antecedent Old English type

ANGRENE WISSE AND HALI MEW HAD 107

was relatively little disturbed. Relative isolation and more
or less definite natural boundaries are suggested by this.

(ii) This language is expressed in a very consistent and
in some ways very individual spelling.

(iii) These considerations taken together suggest a simple
textual history, or at least a peculiarly fortunate one.1 The
normal result of varied copying in such a period as the
Middle English one would be to destroy the consistency of
language and spelling, unless tlte scribe or scribes used
naturally the same language as that of their originals. At
any rate this ‘ normal result ’ is admittedly present in all
the other versions of the Ancrene Wisse. All of these have
in fact the appearance of a blending with the language (A)
of ingredients belonging to different times and places.
The (A) element is their common linguistic element.2 This
throws into still stronger relief the absence of such blending
in A.

Here I think we have to consider a further point. It is
not an entirely new one, though, unless I am mistaken, its
force is not usually appreciated. This language (A) is identical,
even down to minute and therefore significant details, with
the language of MS. Bodley 34, that is, of the versions there
contained of the legends of Juliene, K uterine, Margarete, and
of the homilies 8a ides Warde and Hali Meidhad. This is the
so-called ‘ Katherine group ’. The ‘ Hali Meidhad group ’
would have been a fitter title. I will call it here B ; its
language (B).

A connexion between (A) and (B) is of course recognized.
Hall, for instance, said that ‘ MS. B bears a close resemblance
in all dialectal criteria to MS. A of the Ancrene Wisse though
he declared its ‘ Anglian peculiarities are somewhat more
pronounced ’ (a judgement I do not understand).3 A vague
recognition of the similarity is hidden away in pages 7

1 'there is no analysable difference that I can discover between those
parts of A which are absent from other versions, or differ from them,
and the common mass. The whole is in language (A).

2 This is not universally agreed.

3 E. M. E., ii, p. 503.

108 ANGBENE WISSE AND HALT MEIBHAD

and 8 of Jordan’s M.E. Grammatik. But the case is far more
remarkable and important. At the very least we have here
a closeness of relationship between the language and the
spelling of two distinct MSS. and hands that is astonishing,
if not (as I believe) unique. I will even suggest here that
the unity of (A) and (B) will bear minute analysis, and leave
a residuum of discrepancy which, in view of the quite different
textual history and value of B, is negligible. The two manu¬
scripts are in fact in one language and spelling (AB). And this
is found, as far as I am aware, nowhere else. That is, though
it may be even a preponderating element in other texts,
especially other versions of the same matter, it is not else¬
where found in isolation ; nowhere else is it present in so
consistent and regular a form, and in all its details of grammar
and spelling.

The nearest approach that I know of is to be found in the
K, versions 1 of B’s material (all the above named except Halt
Meifthad). Nearly identical (‘ substantially the same ’ was
Hall’s judgement) as R’s language appears at first sight with
(AB), it is not, especially in spelling, actually the same. Its
closeness to B, which is a copy of the same matter, cannot be
compared with the linguistic relationship of B to A, which are
totally distinct in matter. Its very closeness to B can be made
to illustrate the peculiar relationship of B to A. If one is
thoroughly familiar with the idiosyncrasies of A, one may then
look at, say, Einenkel’s text of St. Katherine (which is chiefly
based on R) and mark, without reference to the apparatus, the
majority of the cases in which the printed text diverges in
forms or spellings from B, and probably predict what the
apparatus will show the B forms to be. That is, language (B)
may be learned through (A), or vice versa. This is my own
experience.

I suggest that this sort of thing is not usual in Middle
English, and requires special consideration. We have two
scribes that use a language and spelling that are nearly as
indistinguishable as that of two modern printed books. Since
the conditions in Middle English were quite different to those
1 MS. B. Mus. Royal 17 A 27.

ANCRENE W1SSE AND HA LI ME WHAT) 109

of the present, it is a reasonable further step to suppose that
A and B are very closely connected both in time and place.
The consistency and individuality of the spelling, since it is
shared by two hands of very different quality, is not that of
an Orm, of an isolated methodist, but suggests obedience to
some school or authority.

There have been, of course, at different times various
localizations and datings, vague or specific, of the originals
of the works contained in A and B. They have been assigned
to places as widely sundered as Dorset, Lichfield, and the
‘ Northern border of the (East) Midlands But, if I am right,
the A and B versions are not to be separated at all.

How much further one would go after this depends on
one’s views of transmission in the Middle English period. At
any rate it is clear that, if any of the parts of A or pieces in
B were not originally composed in this dialect, in the time
and place to which the manuscripts belong, they were then
and there not only copied but accurately translated — so
accurately that there is practically no trace left of the
process.1

I suggest, then, that the very nature of the language (AB)
requires us in all probability to suppose, either :

(i) that A or B or both are originals.

This can only be decided on other grounds ; in the case
of B, at any rate, no claim for originality could be made.

or (ii) that A or B or both are in whole or part accurate
translations, a phenomenon that requires special explana¬
tion.

or (iii) that the vanished originals of A and B were in
this same language (AB), and so belonged to practically
the same period and place as the copies we have (unless
alie have transcribed them with minute linguistic fidelity).

1 No linguistic trace, that is. Textual considerations are not here
concerned. B may offer an indifferent text, and evidence that it is more
or less removed in this respect from its originals, but it do.es not offer
an indifferent language. This is either that of the originals or there has
been accurate translation — the unlikelihood of which is only increased
by the assumption of an inaccurate text.

110 ANCRENE WISSE AND HA LI MEILJIIAD

In the case of A, then, either (i) A is the original Ancrene
Hme (here only a supposition for the sake of argument) ; or
(ii) A is a linguistically skilful translation of some version of
it, which may contain additions and alterations due to the
actual translator ; or (iii) the original Ancrene Wisse was in
language (AB), and therefore belonged to nearly the same
time and place as A, and any intermediate stages there may
have been. If the matter peculiar to A is unoriginal, it
belongs at least to very nearly the same time and place as
the original, and possesses so much the more authority. It
may even constitute a second edition within the knowledge
of the author.

In the case of B we have not probably to deal either with
an original or with an original translation, but with a copy
of pieces that were severally either originally composed in
language (AB), or translated into it at some previous time
not far removed from the making of B, and in the place to
which B belongs.

But we can dismiss some of these suppositions as highly
improbable, if not incredible. There is very little evidence,
I think, in Middle English of accurate transcription of
unfamiliar dialect. Nor is it to be expected. It is notoriously
easy to adulterate a closely related and generally intelligible
form of the same language (dialectal or archaic), even when
the intention is consciously the reverse. Yet scribes, save
in exceptional circumstances (e. g. forgery), were concerned
with matter, not linguistic detail. If they were not merely
inattentive, in which case familiar forms would creep in
unnoticed, they were more likely deliberately to substitute
the familiar than to preserve the unusual. In the absence
of a standard they must often have failed even to observe,
let alone to consider important, many orthographic and
linguistic details that our analysis regards as fundamental.
It needs constant attention to each word if a piece of text
that differs from the copyist’s own language or spelling
habits is to be preserved unadulterated. This is tested
easily enough by copying, say, either a piece of earlier modern
English, or an Old Norse MS. In both cases the divergences

ANCRENE WISSE AND TIA LI MEW11AD 111

between the copy and the copyist’s habits have little or no
bearing on meaning and matter, and some special motive is
required if they are to be retained consistently.

On the other hand, for consistent and accurate translation
of one M.E. dialect into another a knowledge in detail is
demanded of both dialects, as well as a recognition that they
are distinct forms of language — a philological state of mind,
rather than a scribal. And there is still required a special
motive for taking the necessary trouble. What motive or
special circumstance can be suggested that will make the
supposition of ‘ accurate translation ’ in any way credible
for A and B ? Such translation can only be explained if
the form of language substituted was held to have some
special value, was in fact somewhere a ‘ standard ’ that it
was worth considerable pains to maintain. This is possible,
if not very probable, in the abstract. But in the case, at any
rate, of B it is hardly worth considering. B is not the text
that would be produced by a person capable of such pains.
And if we examine the other versions of B, I submit that it
is language (AB) that lies behind each of them, not some
other type from which B or its immediate antecedents were
‘ translated ’.

I also submit, though the case is far more intricate and
totally different conclusions have been reached, that the same
is true of A ; that the least forced explanation of the
linguistic state of the other versions of the Ancrene Wisse is
that behind them, at different removes, lies an original in
language (AB).

Yet even if this is not to be demonstrated or agreed, I sug¬
gest that the supposition of ‘ translation ’, as the explanation
of the purity of the language (AB) in A and B, remains far
less probable or credible than the belief that the originals of
A and B were in the same language and spelling (AB), and
therefore belonged to much the same time and place. It
is a belief which is at least supported by the connexion
that is thus established between the nature of the language
and spelling of these texts on the one hand, and their literary
and stylistic quality on the other. Both point to a place where

112 ANCRENE WISSE AND HALT MEIBHAD

native tradition was not wholly confused or broken ; both
point to a centre where the native language was not unfamiliar
with the pen ; it is not surprising if they both point to the
same place.

I believe then that, if what is here asserted concerning the
character and relations of languages (A) and (B) is true (my
present conviction), it is far and away the most probable
deduction that A and B are substantially in the very language
of the original works, and belong to the same place and at
least approximately the same time as those works and their
authors (or author). To a linguist they are, in other words,
virtually originals.

There are two possible modifications of this deduction that
have not yet been dealt with : the relations of the linguistic
date of (AB) to the palaeographic dates of A and B ; and the
question of originals not in Middle English at all.

It might, for instance, be convenient to some theory of
authorship to suppose that the originals of A and B were
written considerably earlier than the date assignable on
palaeographic grounds (or internal evidence) to the manu¬
scripts.

The linguistic comment on any such theory would, to my
mind, be this. There is little trace in (AB) of mixture of
forms of periods sufficiently separate in time to differ in
orthographic or linguistic usage.1 But the scribe who resists
successfully the tendency to modernize, not in a legal instru¬
ment but in aj, work intended precisely for the instruction of
his contemporaries, is incredible. It is highly improbable
therefore that (AB) is a language already archaic or even
old-fashioned when either A or B were made. In that case
only the supposition remains that the modernization has been
thorough, accurate, and deliberate. But this is only a special
case of the ‘ translation ’ dealt with above. The period of
time intervening, therefore, between the originals and the
copies A, B, is not likely to have been one linguistically
measurable. What sort of limit in years this would involve

1 Occasional uses of £ for g, of s for r, might be instanced, but do not
prove much.

ANCRENE WISSE AND MALI MEIBHAD 113

round about A.r>. 1200 is less easy to say; and we have to
consider in this case the greater resistance to change of a
language that was probably (as suggested above) both
relatively isolated and cultivated. None the less I think that
we should not on linguistic grounds willingly concede more
than a decade or two ; and on this point I shall try to bring
forward a sample of linguistic evidence (below).

Further it might be suggested, and has been, and still is,
that the originals of A and B were not English at all, but
French or Latin. The case of B is not debated. Some of
the pieces (e. g. Sawles Warde) are known to be translations,
or rather free handlings, of Latin sources. But the treatment
observed is so free as to rob it of almost all linguistic
interest; it is of a kind that produces language little if
anything inferior to that of free composition, and it is
almost equally good evidence of the literary cultivation
of the English medium ; it is not novice translation-prose
at all.

It is quite possible that where the English originals of B
were so produced A also might have been translated, though
A appears to rise even higher above the suspicion of being
translation-prose. But the proof, one way or the other, is
outside the scope of linguistic analysis. This debate belongs
to a different field.1

1 It might, however, be observed that certain odd genders occur in
both A and B. dead is, for instance, occasionally feminine in A and B.
Where the genders of nouns are discernible and yet different from those
of O.E. they follow Latin or French. So I believe, but I have not made
full collections on this point. It might be worth while, if it has not
already been done. This might be taken as an indication of translation.
Yet it is difficult to believe that such competent translation would in fact
make such errors. If ascribable to the influence of French or Latin at
all, such confusion of genders is more likely to be the reflection of the
general influence of a knowledge of these languages upon this culti¬
vated sort of English. English of this period was more open to attack
in the accidence of nouns and adjectives than anywhere else. In other
words, we may have here a genuine minor feature of the language
(AB) such as might appear in talking — an actual example of one of the
stages in the history of the loss of gender of which historical grammars

2339-14

114 ANGRENE WISSE AND HA LI MEIHHAD

Proof or supposition of a foreign original still requires us
in tracing the history of the English version to follow the
same line of argument from the nature of the language (AB)
as that already laboured. The final conclusion that I suggest
is that the (English) originals of these works were in
language (AB), they both belonged to nearly the same time,
one not far removed from that of the actual manuscripts A
and B ; and they both belonged to the same (small) area, the
area where manuscripts A and B and their language (AB)
were at home.

The localization or dating of either the manuscripts, or the
language, of A and B is then of much greater importance to
the general problem of the Ancrene Wis.se than has been
allowed.

I am not equipped, nor have I studied the question of this
localization sufficiently, to venture an opinion. It is none the
less, to say no more, highly suggestive that A alone of the
manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse is definitely connected with
Herefordshire, and that the same is true of B. It is certainly
odd that two manuscripts, which at the very least have every
appearance of being closely connected in place of origin,
should both have wandered to that somewhat remote county
in the fourteenth century, if they did not originally belong
there. Historians and others may decide whether Hereford¬
shire could offer the centre we require ; there are, at any rate,
many linguistic considerations that are in its favour, and none
yet to hand (so far as I am aware) that are against it.1 There

speak but seldom furnish instances. A specially interesting case is,
I think, furnished by Halt Meilhad 148 ff. There flesch is referred to as
ha ‘ she ’. This has completely misled the modern English translator,
who writes nonsense ; and has also misled the scribe into misuse of the
pi. form hearmil 148 for the required sg. hear met) (ha also means
‘ they’).

1 The Scandinavian element, has, of course, been used as an argument
against the West in general. Though we, or rather I, do not know
enough about the distribution of words in Middle English to speak with
finality, where phonology does not help, I believe this to be altogether
erroneous. Hall was led, for instance, by the Scandinavian element to

ANCRENE WISSE AND HALT MEIBHAD 115

is relative isolation , which endures to this day, between
Wye and Severn, where an individual linguistic development
might be expected to take place little disturbed, and yet show
intelligible geographical relation to the forms of English that
seem most nearly allied (e. g. Layamon) ; there is proximity
to Wales— a minor point, but aider occurs in Hall MeHShad
and Ancrene Wisse only ; there is remoteness from the East
and from London, which may explain the preservation of

look in the N.E. Midlands for author and originals. Yet if anything
suggests itself to a general consideration of this element, it is that its
connexion is nearly as close with western tradition and alliteration as
that of the native element.

The view of Hall and others appears to have been that the Scandi¬
navian words in A and B are a N.E. element found in their copies, but
alien to the language of the 1 translators ’—who thus could only have know¬
ledge of the words from the spelling and context of a written N.E.
original. Then what are we to think of these scholarly westerners ? Not
content with being the most efficient dialect translators in M.E. they
transform alien Norse words from their natural eastern shape into pre¬
cisely the form they should have had if they were ancestral in the West.
Somewhere in Herefordshire there must have been a school of philology,
which encouraged phonology as well as a study of genuine Norse rather
than its corruption in eastern England. I refer, of course, to such words
as flutten, hulien , which in the East were pronounced and written with i
(Orm flitten n), though derived from O.N. flytia , liylia. The ending of
hulien is also decisively against the East, see Part II. meoc might also be
adduced. The eo-spelling is invariable, and marks out the word at once
to the eye in (AB), since it does not conform, owing to its later adoption
from O.N. *meuk-r , to the ‘ Anglian smoothing ’ characteristic of the lan¬
guage (O.E. seoc is see). How was this correct historical and phonetic
distinction observed, if not guided by colloquial knowledge? Orm’s
spelling meoc cannot explain it, for it is not invariable; he also writes
mec, mek. And there is small likelihood of any easterly text ever having
existed that surpassed Orm in consistency, especially in the application
of the combination eo, when we consider that in the East, if any phonetic
distinction lingered between e-and eo, it was slight and of a different kind
from that preserved in the West. But if Norse words phonologically
testable resist the attempt to derive them from written N.E. texts, the
remainder will require strong evidence indeed of limited distribution
before they can be used as an argument. A and B are rather documents
for a history of the Scandinavian element in England, than to be ex¬
plained away so as to fit a previous view of its distribution.

H 2

116 ANCRENE WISSE AND HALT M FIERI AD

something of old tradition and the archaism ; and there is
the intimate relation of the vocabulary and formulas (allitera¬
tive and other) in A and B both to the westerly lyric, whose
little world lay between Wirral and the Wye,1 and to the
specifically alliterative verse.

I have not dared to apply my linguistic theory to the
questions ‘by whom’ and ‘for whom’. It can clearly say
little here except indirectly and through the answers to
‘ where ’ and ‘ when ’. 1 By whom ’ and ‘ for whom ’ are senti¬
mental questions, and knowledge at any rate of the latter is
not likely to have any importance to scholarship. Neither
is likely to be answered with certainty by any form of re¬
search, short of miraculous luck. If one considers the throngs
of folk in the fair field of the English centuries, busy and
studious, learned and lewd, esteemed and infamous, that must
have lived without leaving a shred of surviving evidence for
their existence, one will hesitate before the most ingenious
guesses of the most untiring researchers at the names and
identities of the original Canterbury pilgrims. The ‘ dear
sisters ’ are as little likely to have left a record in this world.
Their instructor is in more hopeful case ; yet (even in
Herefordshire) there may have been more than one wise
clerk who left no monument, or left a monument without
a name.

Linguistic analysis at any rate will not help us in a search
for him, save in indicating the probable time and place to
look in. Though personally I entirely agree with all that
Hall said (E.M.E., ii. 505 f.) concerning the community of
authorship of A and B (not his identification), and think it
as probable as any such theory can be,2 it must be admitted

1 From Weye he is wisist in to Wyrhale, Johon 27.

2 The difference in spirit between the manner and matter of A and B
has become a commonplace, but depends on a forgetfulness of the very
nature of an anchoress’s life and the spirit that approved it (as the
instructor must have done), and on a misunderstanding of the teaching
and spirit of B, an exaggeration of the ‘ humanity ’ of A the practical
adviser and of the ‘ inhumanity ’ of B the furnisher of edifying reading.
Flagellation, which A disapproves, is not more stem than enclosure and

117

ANCRENE WISSE AND II A LI MEIBHAD

that the linguistic character of the texts does not oblige us
to believe in a common author. Where two different scribes
could write a common language in the same spelling, two
different authors could conceivably have written under the
influence of a common training, reading, and tradition.

It was originally my intention to follow this laborious
argument with a sample of a minute comparison of A and B.
But this has proved impossible of satisfactory accomplish¬
ment within a very little space. To give a brief list of the
peculiar agreements in language and spelling between the
two texts, without recording and discussing the minor dis¬
crepancies, would also be unconvincing, though the agree¬
ment might be conceded as remarkable.

I may briefly instance, however, one line of inquiry and
its bearings. The most important group of words in any
early M.E.text (if one considers date or region, or text corrup¬
tion, 01 is concerned with the general processes of gram¬
matical history in Middle English) is that of the verbs
belonging to the 3rd or ‘ regular ’ weak class, descended from
O.E. verbs with infinitive in -ian, or conjugated on this
model.1

A and B together contain some 550 of these verbs in over
3,300 instances. Of these more than 280 are descended from
recorded O.E. verbs ; about 150 are M.E. verbs (by chance not
recorded in O.E., or recent formations from current nouns
and adjectives, or words of obscure origin) ; about 20 are
Norse, and about 100 French. A study of these 3,300 instances
allows one to establish for AB a regular paradigm to which

virginity which he rigidly protects. Juliene endures brutal flagellation ;
but that one who finds this edifying should discourage its voluntary
practice is no more surprising than a man who honours courage in battle
while advising caution in ciossing the street.

1 This I hope to expound elsewhere at greater length and with special
reference to AB.

118 AN CHEN E WISSE AND II A LI MEILIIAI)

only about 6 exceptions per 1,000 instances can be found
and many of these have a significance in being consistently
employed and being common to A and B.1

This regular paradigm is simply the O.E. paradigm pre¬
served in all its details, except as modified by one or two
normal phonetic changes of universal application : namely,
(1) the weakening of unaccented vowels to e ; (2) the change
of i{f)e to % after a long or polysyllabic stem, while ie
remained after a short stem, or short stem that received a
strong secondary accent ( ondswerien ). The latter ‘ sound-
law ’ is of great importance to the history of M.E. inflexion.
The verbs studied provide between one and two thousand
instances of its operation, and a recognition of this can be
made of considerable service to etymology. The proportion
of exceptions is almost negligible, and such as exist are
usually capable of explanation.

We have in fact a regular relation between pollen [ ich polie,
he poled, ha polled , imper. pole , polled, subj. polie(n), pres. p.
Poliende ] and fondin [ich fondi, he ponded, ha fondid, imper.
fonde, fondid, subj. fond i(n), pres, p .fondinde].

This is remarkable enough, and sufficient evidence at once
of a relatively undisturbed dialect and of a text little adul¬
terated linguistically. But its full force is best appreciated
if one seeks to discover the same rules in other manuscripts
of A or B. There is no space here to demonstrate this. But
very little examination of the manuscripts is required. R
comes best out of such a test — its distinction from (AB) is not
observable so much in this point as in other more minute
points of phonology and spelling. The confusion of the others
varies in degree. T is, of course, without any rules, and
cannot even keep steady in the employment of -ed, - es , -en,

1 For instance, schawin, to show, forms (under the influence probably
of edeawen) the irregular imperative schaw, and pa. t. schawde. Both
these ‘ exceptions ’ are regular in A and B — there is one instance only of
schawede (in Sawles Warde). Compare the ‘ consistent irregularity ’ of
the remarkable AB paradigm warpen (throw) : warpe ; pa. t. iceorp ; pi.
and subj. wurpe{n) ; pp. iwarpen. This has no exceptions in AB, and no
consistent parallels outside.

ANCRENE WISSE AND HALI ME IE HAD 119

let alone observe a distinction between ie and i. Its scribe
may or may not have belonged to Shropshire or other places
where he has been placed (on linguistic evidence !), but his
grammar belongs to no place but MS. T. The irregularity of
the Caius MS. and of Nero can be gauged by a glance at the
specimens in Hall’s Early Middle English.

This development could, I believe, also be made to yield
conclusions concerning date. It is obvious that the i forms
depend, on earlier ie forms, and that a text regularly pre¬
serving ie in all verbs of this class is probably older than
one in which ie has diverged into i and ie. How far we are
to assume different rates of 'phonetic change (as distinct from
changes due to grammatical analogy) in different regions in
the Middle English period, is a difficult question. In the
West in closely related areas a different rate of change is
unlikely.

Now the change iye > % is already observable in Orm
(laffdij) — his verbal forms lokenn, &c., are not phonetic
developments. A greater rate of change in his area may be
conceded. But if we come west, we discover that as we
approach the date 1200 we get not fondin/polien but
fondien/ polien. This latter is substantially the state of the
language of the longer Layamon text, and one of the points
in which that confused document shows analysable regu¬
larity. The same is true of such ‘ O.E. Homilies ’ as the
Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent (O.E. Horn, i, pp. 28 ff.),
a text which has, as a main ingredient, language related in
some remarkable ways to AB (kimeS, bluffeliche, eskien are
examples).

The Owl and Nightingale (C) observes much the same rules
as AB, with a few exceptions, but it contains at least one
specifically ‘ Kentish ’ form wnienge [= ivunienge] 614. This
curious form is the norm in early Kentish, where similar rules
to those of AB can be observed. [The differences are (1)
change of i to e before d ( fundi but fanded) ; (2) wunienge for
AB wununge. The latter is due to regularizing the relations
of fandi(n), fandinge to wunien , *wuninge.]

An analysis of all the early M.E. texts on this basis pro-

120 ANCRENE WISSE AND II A LI MEIBHAD

vides interesting results, which it is impossible to exhibit here.
Among these are the demonstration that the most important
cleavage in M.E. was between the areas (W. and S.) where
the O.E. system of verbs was retained and slowly modified
phonetically, and those where it was violently dislocated and
remodelled before the M.E. period proper began. Orm repre¬
sents the latter. It is clear that his lokenn and fiolenn are
not phonetic developments. The phonetic developments are
seen in laffdig, and the plural adjective wurrpig (beside
manie). By pure phonetic development we should say
warny, groany to this day. In the Scandinavianized part of
England the complete divergence in conjugation between
English and Norse verbs in -ian, -ia ( fandian , fandode :
eggia, eggiada : krejia, kraffla), and their relative rarity in
Norse, had led to a general levelling, probably in late O.E.
times, in favour of -an for all. Of this late O.E. ‘ lingua franca ’
with its Hufan , *fandan one example has, by chance, been
preserved — on the dial on Kirkdale Church (Yorks.) dating
from about a.d. 1064. 1

Where English remained intact, and the few Scandinavian
verbs were fitted into the native system (mostly being
absorbed by the fo'adin or polien classes), we had, until the
thirteenth century was well advanced, a regular development
from O.E., which is clearly observable where the text is pure.
The particular stage represented by AB cannot in the West,
I suggest, be put back much before 1225, if as far. It is
possible that English would long have halted at some such stage
(slightly modified by complete loss of -n, perhaps, and change
of -ith to -eth), had the cultivation of English remained in the
West. How far this stage could be preserved even in the
fourteenth century in a rustic and archaic dialect, Dan Michel
shows. None the less it is clear that the stage was one of

See A. R. Green, Sundials (S.P.C.K. 1926), p. 14. The inscription
leads at the sides : Orm . gamal . | suna bohte . scs | gregorivs min | ster .
Sonne . hi|t wes ael . to^bro || can . 7 tofalan . / he | hit let macan newan
from | grunde xpe . y scs gregori|vs . in . eadward . dagum . eng . in tosti .
dagum . eorl. In the centre : pis is dae-ges solmere se [merce ?] | set ileum
tide . 7 hawarS me wrohte y brand prs.

ANCRENE WISSE AND II A LI MEIEHAD 121

delicate balance easily disturbed, and one that would certainly
fail to be understood by any scribe or speaker not instinctively
guided by the usage of his mother-dialect. Endless confusion
would be certain to arise (and did arise) wherever a scribe and
his copy differed in the matter of these verbs. The mere
statistics of regularity in this respect in AB preclude us,
therefore, from supposing with any probability that these
texts are copies of originals of an older period ( fondien text
and fondin scribe ; or fondin text and fonden scribe J). There is
only one (very doubtful) case of ie after a long stem in all AB.2
There are a very few certain cases of -e for -i, but their percent¬
age is minute, and most of them are explicable as accidental
errors, or the occasional false analogies of speech and writing 3 :

1 A stage fonde(n)/luuie(n) was reached, later than AB and not then
universally, by substitution of the e-endings of all other classes of verbs
for the i-endings. The change was not phonetic, at any rate in the case
of final -i. It led also to the generalization of luui- as the stem (later M.E.
lovyeth sg. and pi., lovyere ). Of this generalization there is no trace in
AB. There variation ie/e is still an inflexional variation accompanied by
clear distinctions of sense.

2 eadmodied imper. pi. A 76/11. N reads (p. 278) makieS eadmod 8;
meokeH our heorle. This has the support of alliteration, and A might be
an accidental error for eadmod [mak~\ied. But in that case the error
would he significant, since T and C have eadmodieL More probable is a
new formation direct from M.E. eadmodi humble. This, having i as part
of the stem, would naturally follow the conjugation of biburien pi. biburiect
(O.E. bebyrgeafr), as did French verbs of similar form chastien, studien.
Beyond eadmode[de] pa. t., O.E. Horn, i, p. 17, this is the only occurrence
of this verb, and direct descent from O.E. eadmodian is doubtful.

3 For instance Jirsen, Juliene 17, beside the normal Jirsin ‘remove,
abandon ’ of AB. But this should be firren (a synonym of firsin). There
are a few cases of s/r confusion, but they are not necessary to explain this
error. In these texts contamination of synonyms, always possible in
copying and found frequently at all periods, is specially easy owing to
the stylistic trick of using together two alliterative synonyms (often ety¬
mological variants lik efolhin and fulien). One of these (to the sense)
unnecessary words was often dropped, or the two blended. An interesting
case of contamination may here be noticed by the way, and as a warning
to the seekers after occasional spellings : A 64/26 has ofsaruet, but this
is not an early example of er>ar, but a contamination of of-seruet with
of-eamet, both familiar words of identical sense (being different stages
in the translation of deservir) in A and B.

122 A NO RENE WISSE AND II A LI ME IB II AD

out of about 1,000 instances only about 8 remain as certain
‘ exceptions’ after examination (e.g. blissen, subj. Katerine 846,
R. blissin). Whether these, out of the many hundreds of
instances, are sufficient to make copying by a ‘ fonclen ’ scribe
a necessary explanation, I leave to others to decide. Person¬
ally I have no doubt that if we could call the scribes of A and
B before us and silently point to these forms, they would
thank us, pick up a pen and immediately substitute the -in
forms, as certainly as one of the present day would emend
a minor aberration from standard spelling or accidence, if it
was pointed to.

This is only a brief and inconclusive sketch of one item of
the comparison between A and B, but I believe it offers some
evidence suggesting, if not demonstrating, that A and B are
uniquely related, and that the events in the textual history of
each took place within less than a generation and round about
A. D. 1225.

I append in illustration, and as a sample, a list of the verbs
of the class discussed that have a recorded O.E. etymon, and
also appear in AB in at least one of the special forms requir¬
ing i or ie by the rule mentioned above.

This list will serve not only as a sample of evidence for
this ‘ sound-law ’, but also a fair sample of the unity of
phonology and spelling of AB. I have recorded every variation
of spelling in these lists that 2,355 instances (about) could
provide. The forms presented are not my normalizations,
but the standard forms of language (AB). The amount of
variation is in fact exaggerated, since many of the recorded
variations are very rare and probably accidental : e. g. easkin
AB, 34 times, eskest in Katerine, once. [Certain regular alterna¬
tions have been disregarded : e.g. cu, for ku ( lokien , locunge );
see , sc (jiscen, yisceunge).]

I. fondin- class. A and B : blescin, blissin, bi-blodgin,
chapin, cneolin, acou(e)rin and courin, adeadin, ? eadmodin,
earnin and of-earnin, easkin ( esk -), eilin, elnin, endin, erndin,
euenin, faleivin, federin (feSrian), festnin, ( uestnin ) and
unfestnin, firsin, folhin, fondin, fostrin, f reinin (? frsegnian),
frourin , gederin, granin, grapin, grenin (grenian), grennin.

ANCRENE WISSE AND MALI MEIBHAD

123

jarkin,jiscin, halsin, bi-he{a)fdin, heardin, hearviin, hercnin,
hihin, hondlin, hongin and ahongin, ladin, lechnin, leornin,
likin and mislikin, limin (limian) and unlimin, lokin and
bi-lokin and luuelokin, milcin, muchlin ( muclin ), mun(e)gin,
murdrin and amurdrin, nempnin, offrin, openin, pinin,
reauin and bi-reauin, bi-reowsin, rikenin (recenian), saluin,
schawin (shawin), smedin, sorhin, sundrin, sun(e)gin, sutelin,
timb'in, tukin to wundre, pon{c)kin, preatin, a-prusmin,
Purlin , wakenin and awakenin, walewin, wardin, warnin,
wergin (wergian), wilnin, windwin, wiuin, wohin, worin,
wreastlin, vmndin, ivundrin and awundrin, wursin, wur&gin
( wurdgin ), and unwurdgin. 96.

A only: bemin (bemian), birlin, blindfe(a)llin (blint-),
borhin, bridlin, clad in, cleansin , clutin and bi-clutin, colin
and acolin, druncnin, feattin, gnuddin (O.E. gnuddian),
godin, greatin, heowin, herb(e)arhin, hungrin and ofhungret,
huntin, meadelin, neappin, se(c)clin, seowin, stoppin and
forstoppin, bitacnin, teohedin (teogojnan), totin, or-trowin,
Peostrin, winkin , wlispin. 35. B only : beddin, cleaterin,
doskin, eardin, *ferkin ‘ feed V hersumin , hoppin, leanin
(hlaenian), lickin, lutlin, medin (median), motin, rarin,
smirkin (smercian), stupin, teonin, wepnin, bivrihelin, won-
drin, wonnin (wannian). 20.

II. Polien- class. A and B : blikien , bodien, carien, cleopien
and bi-cleopien, cwakien, cwikien and a-cwikien,fre(a)mien,
gleadien, gremien, heatien, herien, forhohien, hopien, leadien,
liuien (and libben), lutien and ed-lutien, luuien and bi-luuien,
makien, munien (and rnunnen), ondswerien ( ont on-),
rotien and for-rotien, schapien, scheomien, schunien, slakien,
8mirien, spealien (spelian), spearien, sturien, swerirn (present
stem only, remainder strong), talien , temien, trukien, peauien,
Polien, wakien, werien ‘ defend ’, wonien, wreodien, wunien

1 H 538 feskin and foskin. A sense ‘swaddle ’—impossible to etymo¬
logize— is given in the glossary. The alliterative grouping with foskin
clearly points to O.E. fercian, which is chiefly recorded in senses ‘ provide
for, provide with food though this is the only case of the sense in M.E.
There are other cases of s/r confusion (here aided by fostrin ) : e. g. goder
«= godes, God’s, 710.

124 A N (IRENE W1SSE AND MALI MEIi) HAD

and purh-wunien (and inwuniende). 46. A only: druhien
and a-druhien , for-druhien, Jikien, jeonien, holien, leonien,
notien (‘ partake of red. 1 be employed ’ *) and mis-notien,
prikien, schrapien, sm eodien ‘ forge tilien, werien ‘ wear’ (and
pp. pi. for-iuerede), wleatien ‘nauseate’. 15. B only: beadien,
borien, dearien, gristbe(a)tien, l eodien (libian, leobian), readieu
(aredian ; see note). 6.

Here we have, counting separately verbs with and without
a prefix, about 218 verbs : fondin- class 151, and the less
numerous pollen- class (which contains none the less some very
common verbs) 67. The number of occurrences of i or ie
forms is about 1,081, of other forms about 1,274, in all about
2,355. The number of irregular forms not clearly due to
misunderstanding of the context or other scribal accidents,
and which are not consistently used in A and B, are about 6
in number. One or two, however, of the verbs here appear¬
ing in the pollen- class have been, or still are, credited with
a long stem-vowel in O.E. I append a note on these cases :
lutien (edlutien), trukien, (a)druhien, wleatien, gristbeatien,
readien. O.E. lutian and trucian are now generally admitted
on other evidence ; the forms of AB should make lutian and
trucian disappear finally. O.E. ( a)drugian is still always
printed with a long stem-vowel, but since the occurrences in
metre are not decisive for this, and a short vowel is perfectly
possible etymologically, we may assume with fair certainty
drugian — it must be remembered that the evidence for the
regular working of the rule in AB is in fact much greater in
volume than even the large number of cases provided by
inherited verbs. The long mark should also disappear (as now
usually recognized) from O.E. wlatian and wlxtta. Here we
have the additional evidence of the regular AB ea for O.E. &
(dialectal ea) in open syllables, and of the rhyme in The Owl
and Nightingale 854.

1 A 46 v/17 penne ha servid wel pe ancrehare leafdi, hwen ha notied ham
wel in hare sawle neode. Here the clear and decisive forms of A put the
meaning and construction beyond doubt, both of which are unclear in N
(and the translation p. 178). Note the distinction between notien and
notin ‘ note ’.

ANCRENE WISSE AND IIALI MEW IIAI) 125

readien has not, I believe, hitherto been allowed to be an
O.E. verb or pi'operly interpreted. It provides an example of
the service to etymology of an analysis of AB. Its only
occuiience is in hawles Warde 81: for pet ne mei na tunge
telle) i (sc. hv'uclt is helle), ah after pet ich rmei A con pertowart
ich chulle readien. The sense 1 discourse ’ proposed by Hall
(E.M.E. ii. 501, 511) does not fit p&r towart at all, quite apart
from the iact that the required etymology (a formation from
raed) is against the present rule. O.E. a-redian, ge-redian,
provides us with a satisfactory form (for the ea spelling
cf. freamien, spealien), and aredian (to) ‘find the way to,
make one s way to ’ with a satisfactoi’y sense — 1 according
to my power and knoAvledge I will make an effort in that
direction ’.

gristbeatien is a more difficult case. In our texts it occurs
only in Jul. pp. 67, 69, gristbetede, gristbeatien (R. grispatede,
grispatien) ; for All. (N) p. 326 gristbatede A has risede
‘ trembled . O.E. gristbatian is usually given a, owing to
the apparent etymological connexion with bitan, grisbitian,
although such a vowel-grade in such a formation is abnormal.
A shortening of the element -bat-, either phonetically or under
the influence of the synonymous gristbitian, before the M.E-
development began, will pi’obably be conceded, so that we
need not consider this form as an isolated exception (supported
as it is by R). My faith in the language of AB is possibly
excessive, but I would go further and suggest that the O.E.
word was grisbatian *gristbeatian and never had a long vowel.
Shortening from -bdtian is unlikely in view of the secondary
accent that is required, and the clear apprehension of the
composite nature of the word (shown in the B and Layamon
spellings). A shortened form -bdtian from -6dficm.would fit
well enough as the antecedent of the forms outside B.1 But
the B forms do not fit. Reduction to an obscure vowel is in the
nature of the case ruled out even for the form gristbetede. A

1 In addition to those of R and N there occur : Layamon 1886 grist-
batinge, and 5189 gristbat, possibly an error for the preceding ; XI Pains
of Hell 248 gristbatynge of tepe ; O.E. Horn, i, p. 38 waning and graming
and topen gri&bating.

126 ANCBENE WISSE AND HAL I MEIBHAB

variation ‘ AB ea, e — R ancl other texts a ’ points in all cases to
O.E. a (Germanic a not a secondary shortening) in open
syllables, as in the cases gleadien, heatien, uieatien, above. In
this case, of course, the etymology of gristbatian is obscure.
I suspect that it is a partial assimilation of some other word,
by chance not recorded, to gristbitian (a purely English
formation).1

J. R. R. Tolkien.

1 * gristgramian ? Cf. O.H.G. grisgramon, mod. German Griesgram;
0. S. gristgrimmo. The graining and grisbating of the homily for the first
Sunday in Lent may be a last trace of this and due to an older original.
Graining occurs, I believe, nowhere else, and emendation to granting has
been suggested ; but the homily does not use -ung. Otherwise it has
some forms closely allied to (AB) : see above.

Date Due

apr is

CAT. NO. 23 233 PRINTED IN U.S.A.

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